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New to Trading? Here's some tips
So there seems to be a lot of new people on this sub. And makes sense if you have questions a lot of time you'll turn to reddit for the answers (I know I do). Well here are some tips that I think would benefit new traders.
Don't trade ANY Euro pairs. Look I know it's the most traded pair it goes up and down really fast and there's so much potential for you to make money. Turns out there's even more for you to lose money. It's way too volatile specially if you don't know what you're doing. EUUSD is the worst offender.
Trade the Daily. Might think you're cool looking at charts every x amount of times during the day. You get to tell your friends and family that you trade all day and they might be impressed at what you're doing but unless you have some years under you stick to the daily. There's less noise. You can see clearer trends and when you don't stare at the screen all day you're less emotional therefore a more effective trader. I only look at the chart 15 minutes a day to either enter close or manage my trades. Whatever happens when I'm gone is what happens.
There is no holy grail indicator Look for it all you want. It doesn't exist. There are good indicators. There are bad indicators. There are some indicators that are so broken if you do the opposite of what they're intended for you'll actually make a profit. But the fact remains that there's no perfect one. Stop looking. What you should be looking for is an indicator that fits with your strategy.
What currencies to pick. I actually never see this brought up. The notion in forex is that all pairs can be traded equally. To a certain extent that's not false. But until you get the hang of it stick to a strict trading diet. Look for pairs that trend a lot. Duh look for the trend I can hear you say. When I say trend I don't mean a couple of days or weeks. I mean a couple of months. Half a year. Pairs that do that have a higher tendency to stick with one direction for a while. That's where you make your money. An easy way to identify those pairs as well is putting together a volatile currency (USD) with a less volatile one(JPY).
USE YOUR SL Trust me even if not putting a SL has netted you all kinds of gains eventually the market will turn around and bite you. With no safety net you'll lose most if not all your profit. The best offense is a good defense.
How to pick your TP and SL level. Most new traders care so much about that. I put it near the bottom because in my opinion you should know everything listed first. This is my opinion and I use it for my strategy I use the ATR(average true range) indicator. It's a really helpful tool that helps you identify the range at which the candles will either rise or fall. Obviously you want to set your TP inside of that range and your SL slightly outside of it.
Lot sizes. Everyone has a different story about how they pick their lot size. The general consensus is don't risk over 2% of your account. But I'm a simple man and I can't be bothered to figure out what my risk is every single time. So what I do is I put $0.10 for every $100 I have on the account. I then assign $300(minimum) to each pair. That's $0.30 per pair. It's easy to remember. 10 cent for every $100. If you're able to blow $100 with $0.10 then you probably shouldn't trade.
How to avoid reversals. Tbh you can't. There's no way to predict the future so eventually you'll get hit by one. What you can do however is minimize the blow. How I do it is for every pair I take two trades. If you remember in the previous tip is said I do about$0.30 per pair well I divide it 2:1. I take one trade with a TP(2) and one without (1). If my TP is hit I pocket that amount and if the trend keeps going in my direction I make even more. If the trend decides to end or reverses my losses are minimal because at least I kept half.
There is NO right way to trade. Stop listening to people telling the best way to trade is fundamentals or naked charts of to use some specific indicator. There are no right way to do this. It's as flexible and unlimited as your imagination. I personally use indicators but if that's not your thing do YOU! Just remember to manage your trades properly and be level headed when trading. Hell if your trading strategy is flipping a coin with proper trade management you'd probably make some money (don't quote me on that).
Trade money you're willing to lose Don't trade your rent money.
That's all I have for now. If anyone sees this and wants to add more feel free. Hope this helps someone.
Hi guys, I have been using reddit for years in my personal life (not trading!) and wanted to give something back in an area where i am an expert. I worked at an investment bank for seven years and joined them as a graduate FX trader so have lots of professional experience, by which i mean I was trained and paid by a big institution to trade on their behalf. This is very different to being a full-time home trader, although that is not to discredit those guys, who can accumulate a good amount of experience/wisdom through self learning. When I get time I'm going to write a mid-length posts on each topic for you guys along the lines of how i was trained. I guess there would be 15-20 topics in total so about 50-60 posts. Feel free to comment or ask questions. The first topic is Risk Management and we'll cover it in three parts Part I
Why it matters
Position sizing
Kelly
Using stops sensibly
Picking a clear level
Why it matters
The first rule of making money through trading is to ensure you do not lose money. Look at any serious hedge fund’s website and they’ll talk about their first priority being “preservation of investor capital.” You have to keep it before you grow it. Strangely, if you look at retail trading websites, for every one article on risk management there are probably fifty on trade selection. This is completely the wrong way around. The great news is that this stuff is pretty simple and process-driven. Anyone can learn and follow best practices. Seriously, avoiding mistakes is one of the most important things: there's not some holy grail system for finding winning trades, rather a routine and fairly boring set of processes that ensure that you are profitable, despite having plenty of losing trades alongside the winners.
Capital and position sizing
The first thing you have to know is how much capital you are working with. Let’s say you have $100,000 deposited. This is your maximum trading capital. Your trading capital is not the leveraged amount. It is the amount of money you have deposited and can withdraw or lose. Position sizing is what ensures that a losing streak does not take you out of the market. A rule of thumb is that one should risk no more than 2% of one’s account balance on an individual trade and no more than 8% of one’s account balance on a specific theme. We’ll look at why that’s a rule of thumb later. For now let’s just accept those numbers and look at examples. So we have $100,000 in our account. And we wish to buy EURUSD. We should therefore not be risking more than 2% which $2,000. We look at a technical chart and decide to leave a stop below the monthly low, which is 55 pips below market. We’ll come back to this in a bit. So what should our position size be? We go to the calculator page, select Position Size and enter our details. There are many such calculators online - just google "Pip calculator". https://preview.redd.it/y38zb666e5h51.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=26e4fe569dc5c1f43ce4c746230c49b138691d14 So the appropriate size is a buy position of 363,636 EURUSD. If it reaches our stop level we know we’ll lose precisely $2,000 or 2% of our capital. You should be using this calculator (or something similar) on every single trade so that you know your risk. Now imagine that we have similar bets on EURJPY and EURGBP, which have also broken above moving averages. Clearly this EUR-momentum is a theme. If it works all three bets are likely to pay off. But if it goes wrong we are likely to lose on all three at once. We are going to look at this concept of correlation in more detail later. The total amount of risk in our portfolio - if all of the trades on this EUR-momentum theme were to hit their stops - should not exceed $8,000 or 8% of total capital. This allows us to go big on themes we like without going bust when the theme does not work. As we’ll see later, many traders only win on 40-60% of trades. So you have to accept losing trades will be common and ensure you size trades so they cannot ruin you. Similarly, like poker players, we should risk more on trades we feel confident about and less on trades that seem less compelling. However, this should always be subject to overall position sizing constraints. For example before you put on each trade you might rate the strength of your conviction in the trade and allocate a position size accordingly: https://preview.redd.it/q2ea6rgae5h51.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=4332cb8d0bbbc3d8db972c1f28e8189105393e5b To keep yourself disciplined you should try to ensure that no more than one in twenty trades are graded exceptional and allocated 5% of account balance risk. It really should be a rare moment when all the stars align for you. Notice that the nice thing about dealing in percentages is that it scales. Say you start out with $100,000 but end the year up 50% at $150,000. Now a 1% bet will risk $1,500 rather than $1,000. That makes sense as your capital has grown. It is extremely common for retail accounts to blow-up by making only 4-5 losing trades because they are leveraged at 50:1 and have taken on far too large a position, relative to their account balance. Consider that GBPUSD tends to move 1% each day. If you have an account balance of $10k then it would be crazy to take a position of $500k (50:1 leveraged). A 1% move on $500k is $5k. Two perfectly regular down days in a row — or a single day’s move of 2% — and you will receive a margin call from the broker, have the account closed out, and have lost all your money. Do not let this happen to you. Use position sizing discipline to protect yourself.
Kelly Criterion
If you’re wondering - why “about 2%” per trade? - that’s a fair question. Why not 0.5% or 10% or any other number? The Kelly Criterion is a formula that was adapted for use in casinos. If you know the odds of winning and the expected pay-off, it tells you how much you should bet in each round. This is harder than it sounds. Let’s say you could bet on a weighted coin flip, where it lands on heads 60% of the time and tails 40% of the time. The payout is $2 per $1 bet. Well, absolutely you should bet. The odds are in your favour. But if you have, say, $100 it is less obvious how much you should bet to avoid ruin. Say you bet $50, the odds that it could land on tails twice in a row are 16%. You could easily be out after the first two flips. Equally, betting $1 is not going to maximise your advantage. The odds are 60/40 in your favour so only betting $1 is likely too conservative. The Kelly Criterion is a formula that produces the long-run optimal bet size, given the odds. Applying the formula to forex trading looks like this: Position size % = Winning trade % - ( (1- Winning trade %) / Risk-reward ratio If you have recorded hundreds of trades in your journal - see next chapter - you can calculate what this outputs for you specifically. If you don't have hundreds of trades then let’s assume some realistic defaults of Winning trade % being 30% and Risk-reward ratio being 3. The 3 implies your TP is 3x the distance of your stop from entry e.g. 300 pips take profit and 100 pips stop loss. So that’s 0.3 - (1 - 0.3) / 3 = 6.6%. Hold on a second. 6.6% of your account probably feels like a LOT to risk per trade.This is the main observation people have on Kelly: whilst it may optimise the long-run results it doesn’t take into account the pain of drawdowns. It is better thought of as the rational maximum limit. You needn’t go right up to the limit! With a 30% winning trade ratio, the odds of you losing on four trades in a row is nearly one in four. That would result in a drawdown of nearly a quarter of your starting account balance. Could you really stomach that and put on the fifth trade, cool as ice? Most of us could not. Accordingly people tend to reduce the bet size. For example, let’s say you know you would feel emotionally affected by losing 25% of your account. Well, the simplest way is to divide the Kelly output by four. You have effectively hidden 75% of your account balance from Kelly and it is now optimised to avoid a total wipeout of just the 25% it can see. This gives 6.6% / 4 = 1.65%. Of course different trading approaches and different risk appetites will provide different optimal bet sizes but as a rule of thumb something between 1-2% is appropriate for the style and risk appetite of most retail traders. Incidentally be very wary of systems or traders who claim high winning trade % like 80%. Invariably these don’t pass a basic sense-check:
How many live trades have you done? Often they’ll have done only a handful of real trades and the rest are simulated backtests, which are overfitted. The model will soon die.
What is your risk-reward ratio on each trade? If you have a take profit $3 away and a stop loss $100 away, of course most trades will be winners. You will not be making money, however! In general most traders should trade smaller position sizes and less frequently than they do. If you are going to bias one way or the other, far better to start off too small.
How to use stop losses sensibly
Stop losses have a bad reputation amongst the retail community but are absolutely essential to risk management. No serious discretionary trader can operate without them. A stop loss is a resting order, left with the broker, to automatically close your position if it reaches a certain price. For a recap on the various order types visit this chapter. The valid concern with stop losses is that disreputable brokers look for a concentration of stops and then, when the market is close, whipsaw the price through the stop levels so that the clients ‘stop out’ and sell to the broker at a low rate before the market naturally comes back higher. This is referred to as ‘stop hunting’. This would be extremely immoral behaviour and the way to guard against it is to use a highly reputable top-tier broker in a well regulated region such as the UK. Why are stop losses so important? Well, there is no other way to manage risk with certainty. You should always have a pre-determined stop loss before you put on a trade. Not having one is a recipe for disaster: you will find yourself emotionally attached to the trade as it goes against you and it will be extremely hard to cut the loss. This is a well known behavioural bias that we’ll explore in a later chapter. Learning to take a loss and move on rationally is a key lesson for new traders. A common mistake is to think of the market as a personal nemesis. The market, of course, is totally impersonal; it doesn’t care whether you make money or not. Bruce Kovner, founder of the hedge fund Caxton Associates There is an old saying amongst bank traders which is “losers average losers”. It is tempting, having bought EURUSD and seeing it go lower, to buy more. Your average price will improve if you keep buying as it goes lower. If it was cheap before it must be a bargain now, right? Wrong. Where does that end? Always have a pre-determined cut-off point which limits your risk. A level where you know the reason for the trade was proved ‘wrong’ ... and stick to it strictly. If you trade using discretion, use stops.
Picking a clear level
Where you leave your stop loss is key. Typically traders will leave them at big technical levels such as recent highs or lows. For example if EURUSD is trading at 1.1250 and the recent month’s low is 1.1205 then leaving it just below at 1.1200 seems sensible. If you were going long, just below the double bottom support zone seems like a sensible area to leave a stop You want to give it a bit of breathing room as we know support zones often get challenged before the price rallies. This is because lots of traders identify the same zones. You won’t be the only one selling around 1.1200. The “weak hands” who leave their sell stop order at exactly the level are likely to get taken out as the market tests the support. Those who leave it ten or fifteen pips below the level have more breathing room and will survive a quick test of the level before a resumed run-up. Your timeframe and trading style clearly play a part. Here’s a candlestick chart (one candle is one day) for GBPUSD. https://preview.redd.it/moyngdy4f5h51.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=91af88da00dd3a09e202880d8029b0ddf04fb802 If you are putting on a trend-following trade you expect to hold for weeks then you need to have a stop loss that can withstand the daily noise. Look at the downtrend on the chart. There were plenty of days in which the price rallied 60 pips or more during the wider downtrend. So having a really tight stop of, say, 25 pips that gets chopped up in noisy short-term moves is not going to work for this kind of trade. You need to use a wider stop and take a smaller position size, determined by the stop level. There are several tools you can use to help you estimate what is a safe distance and we’ll look at those in the next section. There are of course exceptions. For example, if you are doing range-break style trading you might have a really tight stop, set just below the previous range high. https://preview.redd.it/ygy0tko7f5h51.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=34af49da61c911befdc0db26af66f6c313556c81 Clearly then where you set stops will depend on your trading style as well as your holding horizons and the volatility of each instrument. Here are some guidelines that can help:
Use technical analysis to pick important levels (support, resistance, previous high/lows, moving averages etc.) as these provide clear exit and entry points on a trade.
Ensure that the stop gives your trade enough room to breathe and reflects your timeframe and typical volatility of each pair. See next section.
Always pick your stop level first. Then use a calculator to determine the appropriate lot size for the position, based on the % of your account balance you wish to risk on the trade.
So far we have talked about price-based stops. There is another sort which is more of a fundamental stop, used alongside - not instead of - price stops. If either breaks you’re out. For example if you stop understanding why a product is going up or down and your fundamental thesis has been confirmed wrong, get out. For example, if you are long because you think the central bank is turning hawkish and AUDUSD is going to play catch up with rates … then you hear dovish noises from the central bank and the bond yields retrace lower and back in line with the currency - close your AUDUSD position. You already know your thesis was wrong. No need to give away more money to the market.
Coming up in part II
EDIT: part II here Letting stops breathe When to change a stop Entering and exiting winning positions Risk:reward ratios Risk-adjusted returns
Coming up in part III
Squeezes and other risks Market positioning Bet correlation Crap trades, timeouts and monthly limits *** Disclaimer:This content is not investment advice and you should not place any reliance on it. The views expressed are the author's own and should not be attributed to any other person, including their employer.
https://eu.excentral.com/blog-article/?articleId=33383 Reading charts isn’t as hard as it might seem, so you should face your fears and learn how to successfully use this great technical analysis tool in your day-by-day trading. To ease up your work we’ll start with Candlestick Charts. The reason this chart type might be simpler to understand is the fact that each candle shows what the overall trend of the asset was, within a certain amount of time. As you might’ve noticed, witheXcentral you have the choice between 9 time-frames, from 1 minute (1/1m) to 1 month (Mo/1M). All you need to do is decide what time-frame you want to choose between short term (1 minute, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours), medium-short term (1 day), medium term (1 week) or medium-long term (1 Month). Once you decide, you will visualise the trend of the asset within that certain period, as one candle. Obviously, and you should know this by now, each green candle represents an increase in the value of the security you’re visualising, while each red candle represents a decrease in its value. You will notice that certain candles have some longer lines below or above them. We call those frail lines tails, and they’re a lot more powerful than they might seem.
Create Strategies Using Charts
The longer the candle’s tails, the higher the asset’s volatility, during your chosen period of time. For this reason, your chart will show 4 different values:
O – the opening value of the candle within your chosen time-frame
H – the highest value your asset reached within that candle’s time-frame
L – the lowest value the asset reached within the reference time frame
C – the closing value for the asset on that specific period
While Open and Close are values where the price managed to stabilise or maintain for more than a fraction of a second, the High and Low are in fact values the price of the asset reached even for a very short period of time, nonetheless, over that predefined period. Knowing these valuable pieces of information, and how to interpret charts over various periods of time, gives you the possibility to create Trading Plans, for longer or shorter periods of time, based on the time-frame for which you create your expectations on. Find out which are the 7 Steps For A Healthy Trading Experience by reading on… Now that you understand these simple facts about charts, you can apply what you learned. Make sure you choose an asset you understand, and try to figure out what trend it follows. If you’re still having a hard time identifying the trend that your chart is displaying, make sure to change between different time-frames, as for certain periods charts can remain pretty flat, without showing any up or down-trends. IF you need more information just make sure to check our other blogs posts, and subscribe forMichalis’ Webinar series. He explains everything from taking your first steps in Forex, all the way to advanced trading strategies, getting in the right trading mindset and Risk Handling Techniques. https://eu.excentral.com/blog-article/?articleId=33383
Former investment bank FX trader: Risk management part II
Firstly, thanks for the overwhelming comments and feedback. Genuinely really appreciated. I am pleased 500+ of you find it useful. If you didn't read the first post you can do so here: risk management part I. You'll need to do so in order to make sense of the topic. As ever please comment/reply below with questions or feedback and I'll do my best to get back to you. Part II
Letting stops breathe
When to change a stop
Entering and exiting winning positions
Risk:reward ratios
Risk-adjusted returns
Letting stops breathe
We talked earlier about giving a position enough room to breathe so it is not stopped out in day-to-day noise. Let’s consider the chart below and imagine you had a trailing stop. It would be super painful to miss out on the wider move just because you left a stop that was too tight. Imagine being long and stopped out on a meaningless retracement ... ouch! One simple technique is simply to look at your chosen chart - let’s say daily bars. And then look at previous trends and use the measuring tool. Those generally look something like this and then you just click and drag to measure. For example if we wanted to bet on a downtrend on the chart above we might look at the biggest retracement on the previous uptrend. That max drawdown was about 100 pips or just under 1%. So you’d want your stop to be able to withstand at least that. If market conditions have changed - for example if CVIX has risen - and daily ranges are now higher you should incorporate that. If you know a big event is coming up you might think about that, too. The human brain is a remarkable tool and the power of the eye-ball method is not to be dismissed. This is how most discretionary traders do it. There are also more analytical approaches. Some look at the Average True Range (ATR). This attempts to capture the volatility of a pair, typically averaged over a number of sessions. It looks at three separate measures and takes the largest reading. Think of this as a moving average of how much a pair moves. For example, below shows the daily move in EURUSD was around 60 pips before spiking to 140 pips in March. Conditions were clearly far more volatile in March. Accordingly, you would need to leave your stop further away in March and take a correspondingly smaller position size. ATR is available on pretty much all charting systems Professional traders tend to use standard deviation as a measure of volatility instead of ATR. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. Averages are useful but can be misleading when regimes switch (see above chart). Once you have chosen a measure of volatility, stop distance can then be back-tested and optimised. For example does 2x ATR work best or 5x ATR for a given style and time horizon? Discretionary traders may still eye-ball the ATR or standard deviation to get a feeling for how it has changed over time and what ‘normal’ feels like for a chosen study period - daily, weekly, monthly etc.
Reasons to change a stop
As a general rule you should be disciplined and not change your stops. Remember - losers average losers. This is really hard at first and we’re going to look at that in more detail later. There are some good reasons to modify stops but they are rare. One reason is if another risk management process demands you stop trading and close positions. We’ll look at this later. In that case just close out your positions at market and take the loss/gains as they are. Another is event risk. If you have some big upcoming data like Non Farm Payrolls that you know can move the market +/- 150 pips and you have no edge going into the release then many traders will take off or scale down their positions. They’ll go back into the positions when the data is out and the market has quietened down after fifteen minutes or so. This is a matter of some debate - many traders consider it a coin toss and argue you win some and lose some and it all averages out. Trailing stops can also be used to ‘lock in’ profits. We looked at those before. As the trade moves in your favour (say up if you are long) the stop loss ratchets with it. This means you may well end up ‘stopping out’ at a profit - as per the below example. The mighty trailing stop loss order It is perfectly reasonable to have your stop loss move in the direction of PNL. This is not exposing you to more risk than you originally were comfortable with. It is taking less and less risk as the trade moves in your favour. Trend-followers in particular love trailing stops. One final question traders ask is what they should do if they get stopped out but still like the trade. Should they try the same trade again a day later for the same reasons? Nope. Look for a different trade rather than getting emotionally wed to the original idea. Let’s say a particular stock looked cheap based on valuation metrics yesterday, you bought, it went down and you got stopped out. Well, it is going to look even better on those same metrics today. Maybe the market just doesn’t respect value at the moment and is driven by momentum. Wait it out. Otherwise, why even have a stop in the first place?
Entering and exiting winning positions
Take profits are the opposite of stop losses. They are also resting orders, left with the broker, to automatically close your position if it reaches a certain price. Imagine I’m long EURUSD at 1.1250. If it hits a previous high of 1.1400 (150 pips higher) I will leave a sell order to take profit and close the position. The rookie mistake on take profits is to take profit too early. One should start from the assumption that you will win on no more than half of your trades. Therefore you will need to ensure that you win more on the ones that work than you lose on those that don’t. Sad to say but incredibly common: retail traders often take profits way too early This is going to be the exact opposite of what your emotions want you to do. We are going to look at that in the Psychology of Trading chapter. Remember: let winners run. Just like stops you need to know in advance the level where you will close out at a profit. Then let the trade happen. Don’t override yourself and let emotions force you to take a small profit. A classic mistake to avoid. The trader puts on a trade and it almost stops out before rebounding. As soon as it is slightly in the money they spook and cut out, instead of letting it run to their original take profit. Do not do this.
Entering positions with limit orders
That covers exiting a position but how about getting into one? Take profits can also be left speculatively to enter a position. Sometimes referred to as “bids” (buy orders) or “offers” (sell orders). Imagine the price is 1.1250 and the recent low is 1.1205. You might wish to leave a bid around 1.2010 to enter a long position, if the market reaches that price. This way you don’t need to sit at the computer and wait. Again, typically traders will use tech analysis to identify attractive levels. Again - other traders will cluster with your orders. Just like the stop loss we need to bake that in. So this time if we know everyone is going to buy around the recent low of 1.1205 we might leave the take profit bit a little bit above there at 1.1210 to ensure it gets done. Sure it costs 5 more pips but how mad would you be if the low was 1.1207 and then it rallied a hundred points and you didn’t have the trade on?! There are two more methods that traders often use for entering a position. Scaling in is one such technique. Let’s imagine that you think we are in a long-term bulltrend for AUDUSD but experiencing a brief retracement. You want to take a total position of 500,000 AUD and don’t have a strong view on the current price action. You might therefore leave a series of five bids of 100,000. As the price moves lower each one gets hit. The nice thing about scaling in is it reduces pressure on you to pick the perfect level. Of course the risk is that not all your orders get hit before the price moves higher and you have to trade at-market. Pyramiding is the second technique. Pyramiding is for take profits what a trailing stop loss is to regular stops. It is especially common for momentum traders. Pyramiding into a position means buying more as it goes in your favour Again let’s imagine we’re bullish AUDUSD and want to take a position of 500,000 AUD. Here we add 100,000 when our first signal is reached. Then we add subsequent clips of 100,000 when the trade moves in our favour. We are waiting for confirmation that the move is correct. Obviously this is quite nice as we humans love trading when it goes in our direction. However, the drawback is obvious: we haven’t had the full amount of risk on from the start of the trend. You can see the attractions and drawbacks of both approaches. It is best to experiment and choose techniques that work for your own personal psychology as these will be the easiest for you to stick with and build a disciplined process around.
Risk:reward and win ratios
Be extremely skeptical of people who claim to win on 80% of trades. Most traders will win on roughly 50% of trades and lose on 50% of trades. This is why risk management is so important! Once you start keeping a trading journal you’ll be able to see how the win/loss ratio looks for you. Until then, assume you’re typical and that every other trade will lose money. If that is the case then you need to be sure you make more on the wins than you lose on the losses. You can see the effect of this below. A combination of win % and risk:reward ratio determine if you are profitable A typical rule of thumb is that a ratio of 1:3 works well for most traders. That is, if you are prepared to risk 100 pips on your stop you should be setting a take profit at a level that would return you 300 pips. One needn’t be religious about these numbers - 11 pips and 28 pips would be perfectly fine - but they are a guideline. Again - you should still use technical analysis to find meaningful chart levels for both the stop and take profit. Don’t just blindly take your stop distance and do 3x the pips on the other side as your take profit. Use the ratio to set approximate targets and then look for a relevant resistance or support level in that kind of region.
Risk-adjusted returns
Not all returns are equal. Suppose you are examining the track record of two traders. Now, both have produced a return of 14% over the year. Not bad! The first trader, however, made hundreds of small bets throughout the year and his cumulative PNL looked like the left image below. The second trader made just one bet — he sold CADJPY at the start of the year — and his PNL looked like the right image below with lots of large drawdowns and volatility. Would you rather have the first trading record or the second? If you were investing money and betting on who would do well next year which would you choose? Of course all sensible people would choose the first trader. Yet if you look only at returns one cannot distinguish between the two. Both are up 14% at that point in time. This is where the Sharpe ratio helps . A high Sharpe ratio indicates that a portfolio has better risk-adjusted performance. One cannot sensibly compare returns without considering the risk taken to earn that return. If I can earn 80% of the return of another investor at only 50% of the risk then a rational investor should simply leverage me at 2x and enjoy 160% of the return at the same level of risk. This is very important in the context of Execution Advisor algorithms (EAs) that are popular in the retail community. You must evaluate historic performance by its risk-adjusted return — not just the nominal return. Incidentally look at the Sharpe ratio of ones that have been live for a year or more ... Otherwise an EA developer could produce two EAs: the first simply buys at 1000:1 leverage on January 1st ; and the second sells in the same manner. At the end of the year, one of them will be discarded and the other will look incredible. Its risk-adjusted return, however, would be abysmal and the odds of repeated success are similarly poor.
Sharpe ratio
The Sharpe ratio works like this:
It takes the average returns of your strategy;
It deducts from these the risk-free rate of return i.e. the rate anyone could have got by investing in US government bonds with very little risk;
It then divides this total return by its own volatility - the more smooth the return the higher and better the Sharpe, the more volatile the lower and worse the Sharpe.
For example, say the return last year was 15% with a volatility of 10% and US bonds are trading at 2%. That gives (15-2)/10 or a Sharpe ratio of 1.3. As a rule of thumb a Sharpe ratio of above 0.5 would be considered decent for a discretionary retail trader. Above 1 is excellent. You don’t really need to know how to calculate Sharpe ratios. Good trading software will do this for you. It will either be available in the system by default or you can add a plug-in.
VAR
VAR is another useful measure to help with drawdowns. It stands for Value at Risk. Normally people will use 99% VAR (conservative) or 95% VAR (aggressive). Let’s say you’re long EURUSD and using 95% VAR. The system will look at the historic movement of EURUSD. It might spit out a number of -1.2%. A 5% VAR of -1.2% tells you you should expect to lose 1.2% on 5% of days, whilst 95% of days should be better than that This means it is expected that on 5 days out of 100 (hence the 95%) the portfolio will lose 1.2% or more. This can help you manage your capital by taking appropriately sized positions. Typically you would look at VAR across your portfolio of trades rather than trade by trade. Sharpe ratios and VAR don’t give you the whole picture, though. Legendary fund manager, Howard Marks of Oaktree, notes that, while tools like VAR and Sharpe ratios are helpful and absolutely necessary, the best investors will also overlay their own judgment. Investors can calculate risk metrics like VaR and Sharpe ratios (we use them at Oaktree; they’re the best tools we have), but they shouldn’t put too much faith in them. The bottom line for me is that risk management should be the responsibility of every participant in the investment process, applying experience, judgment and knowledge of the underlying investments.Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital What he’s saying is don’t misplace your common sense. Do use these tools as they are helpful. However, you cannot fully rely on them. Both assume a normal distribution of returns. Whereas in real life you get “black swans” - events that should supposedly happen only once every thousand years but which actually seem to happen fairly often. These outlier events are often referred to as “tail risk”. Don’t make the mistake of saying “well, the model said…” - overlay what the model is telling you with your own common sense and good judgment.
Coming up in part III
Available here Squeezes and other risks Market positioning Bet correlation Crap trades, timeouts and monthly limits *** Disclaimer:This content is not investment advice and you should not place any reliance on it. The views expressed are the author's own and should not be attributed to any other person, including their employer.
I’ve watched some YouTube videos from a channel called ‘Trade ATS’: ‘95% winning forex trading formula’ and wanted to get some additional input on it’s viability. First, the title is surely hyperbole/ click bait. However, it may work more than 50%, so evaluating that is my aim The basic premise is that major institutional traders are responsible for the majority of market trading volumes. Therefore, hanging on to their coat tails is the best strategy. The market follows three phases sequentially, at every time frame: Contraction -> Expansion -> Trend (then back to contraction). Contraction periods (low volatility & tight open & close) amount to major traders consolidating their positions. Horizontal lines are drawn through these zones and amount to notional support/ resistance zones. Then you watch during the expansion phase to see how the price interacts with the consolidation zone as it whip saws. The idea is to wait until the market decides to go down/ up in a 4 hour chart. If confident that the trend is ongoing, open a 15 min chart and go long at lows during uptrend and short on highs during downtrend. My thoughts: I paused the video when they identified a large portion of the chart using colour codes for Consolidation -> Expansion -> Trend. However, the interpretation seemed a bit stretched in places. For example, even though there were some ‘classic’ examples, there were periods where the ‘consolidation’ was more volatile (albeit ranging) than the expansion/ trend phase. I could seem that, after identifying the obvious examples, they had to impose the model onto the next phase - even though it didn’t really fit - because to do otherwise would undermine the claim that the market follows this linear pattern sequentially without deviation. It seemed to me that the best they could really do was say ‘a fair amount of the time, the market follows this pattern, but sometimes it doesn’t really’. It’s a pretty big claim that the major volume traders together amount to a sort of cartel, and they ultimately decide the direction of the market. What are your thoughts on this claim?
The Forex market is volatile and carries substantial risks. It is not the place to put any money that you cannot afford to lose, such as retirement funds, as you can lose most or all it very quickly. The CFTC has witnessed a sharp rise in Forex trading scams in recent years and wants to advise you on how to identify potential fraud. Signs of a Possible Fraudulent Sales Pitch
Lead you to believe you can profit from current news already known to the public.
Made through word of mouth referrals or emails from friends and relatives, members of community organizations, churches, or social groups.
Contacts you asking for personal information such as your name, phone number, and email and home addresses.
Promising that with Forex there is no “down-turning market”.
Watch for These Red Flags to Help Identify Foreign Currency Trading Scams
Promises that with Forex, there is no “bear” market
Firms that claim you can or should trade in the interbank market
Requests to send or transfer cash quickly via the Internet, by mail, or otherwise
Difficulty getting background information about the person and/or company
So here it is, three more days and October begins, which marks one year of trading for me. I figured I would contribute to the forum and share some of my experience, a little about me, and what I've learned so far. Whoever wants to listen, that's great. This might get long so buckle up.. Three years ago, I was visiting Toronto. I don't get out much, but my roommate at the time travels there occasionally. He asked everyone at our place if we wanted to come along for a weekend. My roommate has an uncle that lives there and we didn't have to worry about a hotel because his uncle owns a small house that's unlived in which we could stay at. I was the only one to go with. Anyways, we walk around the city, seeing the sights and whatnot. My friend says to me "where next?" "I don't know, you're the tour guide" "We can go check out Bay Street" "what's 'Bay Street?'" "It's like the Canadian Wall street! If you haven't seen it you gotta see it!" Walking along Bay, I admire all the nice buildings and architecture, everything seems larger than life to me. I love things like that. The huge granite facades with intricate designs and towering pillars to make you think, How the fuck did they make that? My attention pivots to a man walking on the sidewalk opposite us. His gait stood out among everyone, he walked with such a purpose.. He laughed into the cell phone to his ear. In the elbow-shoving city environment, he moved with a stride that exuded a power which not only commanded respect, but assumed it. I bet HE can get a text back, hell he's probably got girls waiting on him. This dude was dressed to kill, a navy suit that you could just tell from across the street was way out of my budget, it was a nice fucking suit. I want that. His life, across the street, seemed a world a way from my own. I've worn a suit maybe twice in my life. For my first communion, it was too big for me, I was eleven or whatever so who gives a shit, right? I'm positive I looked ridiculous. The other time? I can't remember. I want that. I want the suit. I want the wealth, the independence.I want the respect and power, and I don't give a shit what anyone thinks about it. Cue self doubt. Well, He's probably some rich banker's son. That's a world you're born into. I don't know shit about it. \sigh* keep walking..* A year later, I'm visiting my parents at their house, they live an hour away from my place. My dad is back from Tennessee, his engineering job was laying people off and he got canned... Or he saw the end was near and just left... I don't know, hard to pay attention to the guy honestly because he kind of just drones on and on. ("Wait, so your mom lives in Michigan, but your dad moved to Tennessee... for a job?" Yea man, I don't fucking know, not going to touch on that one.) The whole project was a shit show that was doomed to never get done, the way he tells it. And he's obviously jaded from multiple similar experiences at other life-sucking engineer jobs. My mom is a retired nurse practitioner who no longer works because of her illness. I ask him what he's doing for work now and he tells me he trades stocks from home. I didn't even know you could do that. I didn't know "trading" was a thing. I thought you just invest and hope for the best. "Oh that's cool, how much money do you need to do that?" "Ehh, most say you need at least $25,000 as a minimum" "Oh... guess I can't do that..." Six months later, I get a call and it's my dad. We talk a little about whatever. Off topic, he starts asking if I'm happy doing what I'm doing (I was a painter, commercial and residential) I tell him yes but it's kind of a pain in the ass and I don't see it as a long term thing. Then he gets around to asking if I'd like to come work with him. He basically pitches it to me. I'm not one to be sold on something, I'm always skeptical. So I ask all the questions that any rational person would ask and he just swats them away with reassuring phrases. He was real confident about it. But basically he says for this to work, I have to quit my job and move back home so he can teach me how to trade and be by my side so I don't do anything stupid. "My Name, you can make so much money." I say that I can't raise the $25,000 because I'm not far above just living paycheck to paycheck. "I can help you out with that." Wow, okay, well... let me think about it. My "maybe" very soon turned into a "definitely." So over the next six months, I continue to work my day job painting, and I try to save up what I could for the transition (it wasn't a whole lot, I sucked at saving. I was great at spending though!). My dad gives me a book on day trading (which I will mention later) and I teach myself what I can about the stock market using Investopedia. Also in the meantime, my dad sends me encouraging emails. He tells me to think of an annual income I would like to make as a trader, and used "more than $100,000 but less than a million" as a guideline. He tells me about stocks that he traded that day or just ones that moved and describes the basic price action and the prices to buy and sell at. Basically saying "if you bought X amount of shares here and sold it at X price here, you could make a quick 500 bucks!" I then use a trading sim to trade those symbols and try to emulate what he says. Piece of cake. ;) Wow, that's way more than what I make in a day. He tells me not to tell anyone about my trading because most people just think it's gambling. "Don't tell your Mom either." He says most people who try this fail because they don't know how to stop out and take a loss. He talks about how every day he was in a popular chatroom, some noob would say something like, "Hey guys, I bought at X price (high of day or thereabout), my account is down 80% .. uhh I'm waiting for it to come back to my entry price.. what do I do??" Well shit, I'm not that fucking dumb. If that's all it takes to make it is to buy low, sell high, and always respect a stop then I'll be fantastic. By the end of September, I was very determined. I had been looking forward everyday to quitting my painting job because while it used to be something I loved, it was just sucking the life out of me at this point. Especially working commercial, you just get worked like a dog. I wasn't living up to my potential with that job and I felt awful for it every minute of every day. I knew that I needed a job where I could use my brain instead of slaving my body to fulfill someone else's dream. "Someone's gotta put gas in the boss's boat" That's a line my buddy once said that he probably doesn't know sticks with me to this day. It ain't me. So now it was October 2018, and I'm back living with Mom n' Pops. I was so determined that on my last day of work I gave away all of my painting tools to my buddy like, "here, I don't need this shit." Moving out of my rental was easy because I don't own much, 'can't take it with ya.' Excited for the future I now spend my days bundled up in winter wear in the cold air of our hoarder-like basement with a space heater at my feet. My laptop connected to a TV monitor, I'm looking at stocks next to my dad and his screens in his cluttered corner. Our Trading Dungeon. I don't trade any money, (I wasn't aware of any real-time sim programs) I just watch and learn from my dad. Now you've got to keep in mind, and look at a chart of the S&P, this is right at the beginning of Oct '18, I came in right at the market top. Right at the start of the shit-show. For the next three or four weeks, I watch my dad pretty much scratch on every trade, taking small loss after small loss, and cursing under his breath at the screen. Click. "dammit." Click. "shit." Click. Click. "you fuck." Click. This gets really fucking annoying as time goes on, for weeks, and I get this attitude like ugh, just let me do it. I'll make us some fucking money. So I convince him to let me start trading live. I didn't know anything about brokers so I set up an account using his broker, which was Fidelity. It was a pain and I had to jump through a lot of hoops to be able to day trade with this broker. I actually had to make a joint account with my dad as I couldn't get approved for margin because my credit score is shit (never owned a credit card) and my net worth, not much. Anyways, they straight up discourage day trading and I get all kinds of warning messages with big red letters that made me shit myself like oooaaahhh what the fuck did I do now. Did I forget to close a position?? Did I fat finger an order? Am I now in debt for thousands of dollars to Fidelity?? They're going to come after me like they came after Madoff. Even after you are approved for PDT you still get these warning messages in your account. Some would say if I didn't comply with "whatever rule" they'd even suspend my account for 60 days. It was ridiculous, hard to describe because it doesn't make sense, and it took the support guy on the phone a good 20 minutes to explain it to me. Basically I got the answer "yea it's all good, you did nothing wrong. As long as you have the cash in your account to cover whatever the trade balance was" So I just kept getting these warnings that I had to ignore everyday. I hate Fidelity. My fist day trading, I made a few so-so trades and then I got impatient. I saw YECO breaking out and I chased, soon realized I chased, so I got out. -$500. Shit, I have to make that back, I don't want my dad to see this. Got back in. Shit. -$400. So my first day trading, I lost $900. My dumbass was using market orders so that sure didn't help. I reeled the risk back and traded more proper position size for a while, but the commissions for a round trip are $10, so taking six trades per day, I'm losing $60 at a minimum on top of my losing trades. Quickly I realized I didn't know what the hell I was doing. What about my dad? Does HE know? One day, in the trading dungeon, I was frustrated with the experience I'd been having and just feeling lost overall. I asked him. "So, are you consistently profitable?" "mmm... I do alright." "Yea but like, are you consistently profitable over time?" ......................... "I do alright." Silence. "Do you know any consistently profitable traders?" "Well the one who wrote that book I gave you, Tina Turner.. umm and there's Ross Cameron" ...................... "So you don't know any consistently profitable traders, personally.. People who are not trying to sell you something?" "no." ................... Holy fucking shit, what did this idiot get me into. He can't even say it to my face and admit it. This entire life decision, quitting my job, leaving my rental, moving from my city to back home, giving shit away, it all relied on that. I was supposed to be an apprentice to a consistently profitable day trader who trades for a living. It was so assumed, that I never even thought to ask! Why would you tell your son to quit his job for something that you yourself cannot do? Is this all a scam? Did my dad get sold a DREAM? Did I buy into some kind of ponzi scheme? How many of those winning trades he showed me did he actually take?Are there ANY consistently profitable DAY TRADERS who TRADE FOR A LIVING?Why do 90% fail? Is it because the other 10% are scamming the rest in some way? Completely lost, I just had no clue what was what. If I was going to succeed at this, if it was even possible to succeed at this, it was entirely up to me. I had to figure it out. I still remember the feeling like an overwhelming, crushing weight on me as it all sunk in. This is going to be a big deal.. I'm not the type to give up though. In that moment, I said to myself, I'm going to fucking win at this. I don't know if this is possible, but I'm going to find out. I cannot say with certainty that I will succeed, but no matter what, I will not give up. I'm going to give all of myself to this. I will find the truth. It was a deep moment for me. I don't like getting on my soapbox, but when I said those things, I meant it. I really, really meant it. I still do, and I still will. Now it might seem like I'm being hard on my dad. He has done a lot for me and I am very grateful for that. We're sarcastic as hell to each other, I love the bastard. Hell, I wouldn't have the opportunity to trade at all if not for him. But maybe you can also understand how overwhelmed I felt at that time. Not on purpose, of course he means well. But I am not a trusting person at all and I was willing to put trust into him after all the convincing and was very disappointed when I witnessed the reality of the situation. I would have structured this transition to trading differently, you don't just quit your job and start trading. Nobody was there to tell me that! I was told quite the opposite. I'm glad it happened anyway, so fuck it. I heard Kevin O'Leary once say, "If I knew in the beginning how difficult starting a business was, I don't know that I ever would've started." This applies very much to my experience. So what did I do? Well like everyone I read and read and Googled and Youtube'd my ass off. I sure as hell didn't pay for a course because I didn't have the money and I'm like 99% sure I would be disappointed by whatever they were teaching as pretty much everything can be found online or in books for cheap or free. Also I discovered Thinkorswim and I used that to sim trade in real-time for three months. This is way the hell different than going on a sim at 5x speed and just clicking a few buy and sell buttons. Lol, useless. When you sim trade in real-time you're forced to have a routine, and you're forced to experience missing trades with no chance to rewind or skip the boring parts. That's a step up because you're "in it". I also traded real money too, made some, lost more than I made. went back to sim. Traded live again, made some but lost more, fell back to PDT. Dad fronted me more cash. This has happened a few times. He's dug me out of some holes because he believes in me. I'm fortunate. Oh yeah, about that book my dad gave me. It's called A Beginner's Guide to Day Trading Online by Toni Turner. This book... is shit. This was supposed to be my framework for how to trade and I swear it's like literally nothing in this book fucking works lol. I could tell this pretty early on, intuitively, just by looking at charts. It's basically a buy-the-breakout type strategy, if you want to call it a strategy. No real methodology to anything just vague crap and showing you cherry-picked charts with entries that are way too late. With experience in the markets you will eventually come to find that MOST BREAKOUTS FAIL. It talks about support/resistance lines and describes them as, "picture throwing a ball down at the floor, it bounces up and then it bounces down off the ceiling, then back up." So many asinine assumptions. These ideas are a text book way of how to trade like dumb money. Don't get me wrong, these trades can work but you need to be able to identify the setups which are more probable and identify reasons not to take others. So I basically had to un-learn all that shit. Present day, I have a routine in place. I'm out of the dungeon and trade by myself in my room. I trade with a discount broker that is catered to day traders and doesn't rape me on commissions. My mornings have a framework for analyzing the news and economic events of the particular day, I journal so that I can recognize what I'm doing right and where I need to improve. I record my screens for later review to improve my tape reading skills. I am actually tracking my trades now and doing backtesting in equities as well as forex. I'm not a fast reader but I do read a lot, as much as I can. So far I have read about 17-18 books on trading and psychology. I've definitely got a lot more skilled at trading. As of yet I am not net profitable. Writing that sounds like selling myself short though, honestly. Because a lot of my trades are very good and are executed well. I have talent. However, lesser quality trades and trades which are inappropriately sized/ attempted too many times bring down that P/L. I'm not the type of trader to ignore a stop, I'm more the trader that just widdles their account down with small losses. I trade live because at this point, sim has lost its value, live trading is the ultimate teacher. So I do trade live but I just don't go big like I did before, I keep it small. I could show you trades that I did great on and make people think I'm killing it but I really just don't need the validation. I don't care, I'm real about it. I just want to get better. I don't need people to think I'm a genius, I'm just trying to make some money. Psychologically, to be honest with you, I currently feel beaten down and exhausted. I put a lot of energy into this, and sometimes I work myself physically sick, it's happened multiple times. About once a week, usually Saturday, I get a headache that lasts all day. My body's stress rebound mechanism you might call it. Getting over one of those sick periods now, which is why I barely even traded this week. I know I missed a lot of volatility this week and some A+ setups but I really just don't give a shit lol. I just currently don't have the mental capital, I think anyone who's been day trading every day for a year or more can understand what I mean by that. I'm still being productive though. Again, I'm not here to present an image of some badass trader, just keeping it real. To give something 100% day after day while receiving so much resistance, it takes a toll on you. So a break is necessary to avoid making bad trading decisions. That being said, I'm progressing more and more and eliminating those lesser quality trades and identifying my bad habits. I take steps to control those habits and strengthen my good habits such as having a solid routine, doing review and market research, taking profits at the right times, etc. So maybe I can give some advice to some that are new to day trading, those who are feeling lost, or just in general thinking "...What the fuck..." I thought that every night for the first 6 months lol. First of all, manage expectations. If you read my story of how I came to be a trader, you can see I had a false impression of trading in many aspects. Give yourself a realistic time horizon to how progress should be made. Do not set a monetary goal for yourself, or any time-based goal that is measured in your P/L. If you tell yourself, "I want to make X per day, X per week, or X per year" you're setting yourself up to feel like shit every single day when it's clear as the blue sky that you won't reach that goal anytime soon. As a matter of fact, it will appear you are moving further AWAY from that goal if you just focus on your P/L, which brings me to my next point. You will lose money. In the beginning, most likely, you will lose money. I did it, you'll do it, the greatest Paul Tudor Jones did it. Trading is a skill that needs to be developed, and it is a process. Just look at it as paying your tuition to the market. Sim is fine but don't assume you have acquired this skill until you are adept at trading real money. So when you do make that leap, just trade small. Just survive. Trade small. get the experience. Protect your capital. To reach break even on your bottom line is a huge accomplishment. In many ways, experience and screen time are the secret sauce. Have a routine. This is very important. I actually will probably make a more in-depth post in the future about this if people want it. When I first started, I was overwhelmed with the feeling "What the fuck am I supposed to DO?" I felt lost. There's no boss to tell you how to be productive or how to find the right stocks, which is mostly a blessing, but a curse for new traders. All that shit you see, don't believe all that bullshit. You know what I'm talking about. The bragposting, the clickbait Youtube videos, the ads preying on you. "I made X amount of money in a day and I'm fucking 19 lolz look at my Lamborghini" It's all a gimmick to sell you the dream. It's designed to poke right at your insecurities, that's marketing at it's finest. As for the bragposting on forums honestly, who cares. And I'm not pointing fingers on this forum, just any trading forum in general. They are never adding anything of value to the community in their posts. They never say this is how I did it. No, they just want you to think they're a genius. I can show you my $900 day trading the shit out of TSLA, but that doesn't tell the whole story. Gamblers never show you when they lose, you might never hear from those guys again because behind the scenes, they over-leveraged themselves and blew up. Some may actually be consistently profitable and the trades are 100% legit. That's fantastic. But again, I don't care, and you shouldn't either. You shouldn't compare yourself to others. "Everyone's a genius in a bull market" Here's the thing.. Markets change. Edges disappear. Trading strategies were made by traders who traded during times when everything they did worked. Buy all the breakouts? Sure! It's the fucking tech bubble! Everything works! I'm sure all those typical setups used to work fantastically at some point in time. But the more people realize them, the less effective they are. SOMEONE has to be losing money on the opposite side of a winning trade, and who's willing to do that when the trade is so obvious? That being said, some things are obvious AND still work. Technical analysis works... sometimes. The caveat to that is, filters. You need to, in some way, filter out certain setups from others. For example, you could say, "I won't take a wedge pattern setup on an intraday chart unless it is in a higher time frame uptrend, without nearby resistance, and trading above average volume with news on that day." Have a plan. If you can't describe your plan, you don't have one. Think in probabilities. You should think entirely in "if, then" scenarios. If X has happens, then Y will probably happen. "If BABA breaks this premarket support level on the open I will look for a pop up to short into." Backtest. Most traders lose mainly because they think they have an edge but they don't. You read these books and all this stuff online telling you "this is a high probability setup" but do you know that for a fact? There's different ways to backtest, but I think the best way for a beginner is manual backtesting with a chart and an excel sheet. This builds up that screen time and pattern recognition faster. This video shows how to do that. Once I saw someone do it, it didn't seem so boring and awful as I thought it was. Intelligence is not enough. You're smarter than most people, that's great, but that alone is not enough to make you money in trading necessarily. Brilliant people try and fail at this all the time, lawyers, doctors, surgeons, engineers.. Why do they fail if they're so smart? It's all a fucking scam. No, a number of reasons, but the biggest is discipline and emotional intelligence. Journal every day.K no thanks, bro. That's fucking gay. That's how I felt when I heard this advice but really that is pride and laziness talking. This is the process you need to do to learn what works for you and what doesn't. Review the trades you took, what your plan was, what actually happened, how you executed. Identify what you did well and what you can work on. This is how you develop discipline and emotional intelligence, by monitoring yourself. How you feel physically and mentally, and how these states affect your decision-making. Always be learning. Read as much as you can. Good quality books. Here's the best I've read so far; Market Wizards -Jack Schwager One Good Trade -Mike Bellafiore The Daily Trading Coach -Bret Steenbarger Psycho-cybernetics -Maxwell Maltz Why You Win or Lose -Fred Kelly The Art and Science of Technical Analysis -Adam Grimes Dark Pools -Scott Patterson Be nimble. Everyday I do my research on the symbols I'm trading and the fundamental news that's driving them. I might be trading a large cap that's gapping up with a beat on EPS and revenue and positive guidance. But if I see that stock pop up and fail miserably on the open amidst huge selling pressure, and I look and see the broader market tanking, guess what, I'm getting short, and that's just day trading. The movement of the market, on an intraday timeframe, doesn't have to make logical sense. Adapt. In March I used to be able to buy a breakout on a symbol and swing it for the majority of the day. In the summer I was basically scalping on the open and being done for the day. Volatility changes, and so do my profit targets. Be accountable. Be humble. Be honest. I take 100% responsibility for every dime I've lost or made in the market. It's not the market makers fault, it wasn't the HFTs, I pressed the button. I know my bad habits and I know my good habits.. my strengths/ my weaknesses. Protect yourself from toxicity. Stay away from traders and people on forums who just have that negative mindset. That "can't be done" mentality. Day trading is a scam!! It can certainly be done. Prove it, you bastard. I'm posting to this particular forum because I don't see much of that here and apparently the mods to a good job of not tolerating it. As the mod wrote in the rules, they're most likely raging from a loss. Also, the Stocktwits mentality of "AAPL is going to TANK on the open! $180, here we come. $$$" , or the grandiose stories, "I just knew AMZN was going to go up on earnings. I could feel it. I went ALL IN. Options money, baby! ka-ching!$" Lol, that is so toxic to a new trader. Get away from that. How will you be able to remain nimble when this is your thought process? Be good to yourself. Stop beating yourself up. You're an entrepreneur. You're boldly going where no man has gone before. You've got balls. Acknowledge your mistakes, don't identify with them. You are not your mistakes and you are not your bad habits. These are only things that you do, and you can take action necessary to do them less. It doesn't matter what people think. Maybe they think you're a fool, a gambler. You don't need their approval. You don't need to talk to your co-workers and friends about it to satisfy some subconscious plea for guidance; is this a good idea? You don't need anyone's permission to become the person you want to be. They don't believe in you? Fuck 'em. I believe in you.
T3 Newsbeat Live is run by Mark Melnick, a 20-year veteran trader from New York. According to him, he made his first million at the age of 19 during the dot-com boom back in the late 90s. He claims that his trading room is the fastest growing trading room at T3 and also the Wall Street’s #1 trading room. You can see this in the description of his videos on Youtube. He is a big proponent of reaching the highest win rate possible in trading. He openly shares some of his trading strategies in free videos and claims that some of his strategies are batting over 70% or even 80 %. He also often says that some of the members enjoy a win rate over 90% using his strategies. I will let you be the judge of this. Self-Promotion He makes a lot of videos to attract new people into his trading room. His daily videos are uploaded on Facebook and Youtube almost daily even on Weekends (mostly excluding Friday evening & Saturdays). In so many videos you’d hear him talking about how his trading room has an edge over other trading rooms while bashing other trading rooms as a whole. He often talks about how his trading room bought stocks/options at the near bottom or shorted at the near top using his “algorithmic analysis” which can be applied to all markets (stocks, future, forex, crypto). Piques your curiosity, right? In fact, that’s how I got to give his trading room a try. “Who in the hell wouldn’t want to catch the top & bottom in the markets, right?” So, you would think people in his room and himself are making a killing using his algorithmic analysis? Not so fast… (in fact, his algorithmic analysis is just drawing trendlines and identifying the most probable support and resistance) When it works (of course, nothing works 100% of the time), you are able to catch just few cents off the top and bottom when it works if you follow his trade. However, you have no idea how long you’d have to hold your position. Mark doesn’t know either. So, he usually goes for nickels and dimes and rarely holds a position longer than 5 minutes. Even if he’s good at picking bottoms and tops, you’d often risk more than nickels and dimes just to make nickels and dimes. Make sense, right? ……. ……. ……. Also, because he gets out of his positions fast, he misses out on riding some potentially big trades. Oh, how I wish stay in that position a bit longer. He doesn’t say but one can surmise that he often leave too much on the table. Of course, it’s important to take your profit fast when you scalp but you consistently leave too much on the table like he does, one has to wonder if he has any system for taking profits (otherwise, it’s all discretionary guessing). This type of bottom/top picking is not his main strategy, though. The strategy that makes him the most amount of money might surprise you. I will get to this later. How Mark Trades (Mark’s Trading Setups and Strategies) Mainly, he scans the market in the morning for earnings reports, analysts’ upgrades/downgrades and other catalysts that have potential to make moves in the market. He openly shares his mockery or insult of analysts, calling certain analysts “idiots” or “imbeciles”. He puts on his first trade(s) early in the morning (from 9:30AM to 10:00AM Eastern Standard Time) when the market move is the most volatile. Some of his strategies use market order during this period of volatile time using options. You can see why this can be very risky and especially on thinly traded options with side spread. He does point out this but sometimes you hear people in the room stuck in an options position that they can’t get out. Just like his trades from calling the top/bottom of a stock, he gets in and gets out of a position within minutes if not seconds while going for nickels and dimes while staring at 1minute and 5-minutes charts. That applies to most, if not all of his strategies. (Yes, sometimes he does catch bigger moves than nickels and dimes.) When you trade during the most volatile time in the morning, you’re subjected to wild moves in both directions. If you’re overly prudent or inexperienced in trading, your stop (unless very wide), has a very high chance of hitting. A lot of times it might stop you out and go in the direction that you predicted. So, when you’ve been trading during this time, you’d probably don’t set a stoploss order or a hard stop to avoid getting fleeced. You do have to be proactive at cutting your loss as quickly as possible. Otherwise you’d find yourself scrambling to get out your position while the bid keeps dropping. I have to say that Mark is very cautious and he does get out of trades very fast if he has doubt. A lot of times he lets out exhausting, heavy sighs and even murmurs some swear words when things don’t seem to go the way he wants in a trade. Besides calling certain analysts, “imbeciles” and “idiots”, this is quite unprofessional but no one in the room has the gut to point things out like this. The irony is that he is the “head of trading psychology” at T3 and it doesn’t seem like that he doesn’t have much control over his trading psychology and let alone his emotion. People in trading chatrooms, like a herd of sheep, as a whole exhibit herd mentality. Even in an online chatroom, you don’t often see someone ruffling feathers and say what they really want to say. This is probably because of the certain amount of people believing whatever he says without questioning the validity and quality of his comments. He has several strategies and according to him all of them have win rate over %70. However, he also comes up with new strategies as often as every month. He either comes up with new strategy or tweaks his existing strategies. According to him, the reason is that the market is always evolving and you need to constantly adapt yourself to the ever-changing market environment. What do you think? Does this sound like someone with an edge? And for someone who scalps for nickels and dimes, he claims to have the highest Sharpe Ratio that he has ever seen in the industry. I’m NOT making this up. He often utters remarks like “My Sharpe Ratio is one of the highest I’ve seen in my twenty-year trading career.”, “I want to create a of traders with a very high Sharpe Ratio. How can you achieve a high Sharpe Ratio when you scalp all the time? And let’s not even talk about commissions generated from frequent scalping. Who cares about commissions when you can be a scalper with high Sharpe Ratio? Now, I want to talk about something controversial about his most profitable strategy. Chatters According to him, he makes the most amount of money using what he calls “Chatters”. He admits he bets on this kind of trades heavily. His chatter trades are based on the “newsflow” of big funds making a move in certain stocks and piggybacking on the same trade before others catch on. No one knows how he exactly gets his “newsflow” and he doesn’t give a straight answer when asked. Maybe he pays a lot for this kind of information or maybe it’s given to him for free. Who knows? But it makes sense. The name of the room is Newsbeat Live. Without this the name wouldn’t be the same. This is probably the only real edge that he has and it’s understandable that he doesn’t want to reveal how he get this kind of newsflow and from where. By joining his trading room he’ll make a callout on these trades for you to take advantage of. In order to do this kind of trade, you have to be very quick on your trigger finger. Almost always the initial move is done within a couple of minutes, if not seconds. If you get in late, you find yourself a sucker buying at or near the top. Also, because you want to get in as soon as you hear his “chatter” announcements, he advised people to get in within 5 seconds of each chatter announcement and use market order to get in. He said that if he had a small account, he’d bet 100% on this kind of “high-octane” chatter trades and get in and get out fast for “easy” money. This was how chatter trades were done …Until one they when many people got burned badly. Back in September or October of 2019, a lot of people in the room lost a lot money because they market ordered call options contracts on a chatter trade. The spread on that trade was something like BID: 0.5 ASK: 5.00 few seconds after he announced it. I didn’t take that trade. No way, I’m going to buy something that has a spread like that. If you’ve been trading options you know that this kind of spread can happen. Many people that day in the room marketed-in on the trade, taking the offer at ASK. They found themselves buying at $5.0 per contract when someone probably bought the same contract at $0.40 or $0.50 just few seconds ago. Someone walked away with decent profits on that trade. This was the biggest trading chatroom fiasco I’ve ever seen. People in the room grieving and throwing numbers of how much they had just lost. 10K, 20K, 30K and even $60K. Could it be also that someone who lost more and didn’t want to talk about it because it’d hurt too much? And how embarrassing to talk about such a loss. I give credit to people who spoke up about it. People were obviously distressed and what did Mr. Mark Melnick do at this moment? Initially, he didn’t say much. But what he said he was going to walk away from the trading desk to clear his mind. It took a while for him to come back and he mentioned that it hurt him a lot that people lost a lot of money and encouraged people not to hesitate to contact him. I don’t think he ever said anything about that he made a mistake insinuating to load up on chatter trades. No apology since everyone who took the trade did it at their own risk. He advised people to reach out to their broker and do whatever it takes to get their trades annulled because the market makers in that trades were despicable crooks and evil. But let’s get one thing clear. Perhaps the cold hard truth. Since Mark is the one who announces chatter trades. he basically frontruns everyone who gets in on these trades after him. There were times when he doesn’t take his own chatter trades and lets the room have it. But when he does, it’s a guarantee win for him. He has some sycophantic followers in his trading room and these people are always hungry for chatter plays. I can imagine drooling over the idea of next chatter trades. It’s human to naturally seek the least path of resistance and this type of trade requires no skill but having fast trigger finger and a platform that allows fast execution. By taking his chatter trades, you are most likely to make money as long as you act fast to get in and get out. The thing is, you don’t know when it’s exactly the next chatter trade is going to happen. If you take a bathroom break, you just miss it. If you take a phone call or answer a door bell, you just missed it. So, it requires you to be glued to your monitor(s) if you want to make the most of your subscription. So, we went over Mark’s most profitable strategy. But wait we haven’t yet to talk about his overnight swing trades. Mark’s Swing Trades His overnight swing trades jokes. Yes, jokes. A lot of his overnight trades are done just before earnings announcements when implied volatility is at the highest. You’ve ever bought a call option just before earnings, predicted the right direction but only to find out that you still lost money next morning? This is because of the implied volatility crush post earnings. A lot of people new to options don’t know this and get taken advantage by veterans this way. I don’t know if Mark knows or not but I witnessed him buying options this way. I think he understand the concept of implied volatility but why he gets on such trades is a mystery. I haven’t exactly checked the result of all of his swing trades but I wouldn’t be surprised if people lost more money following his swing trades than anything in the room. Final Word Mark offers “free-consultation” on the phone for people who struggle in their trading. He said that he takes a lot of phone calls but often you’d get the feeling that he is distracted, unable to give an undivided attention for his consultation. “How would you like to get on a free consultation with a millionaire scalper who can take your trading to the next level?” Appealing isn’t it? But would you want to get on the phone with someone who is going to give a consultation, even if he or she is distracted? Oh, it’s a free consultation. Ok, why not? What do I got to lose? In his videos, you’d hear him saying that he cares for everyone in his trading room and considers them as part of his family. And he runs the trading room out of his good heart and intention more than making money. Besides he says that he makes more money from his trading than running the room. My suggestion is that you have a look and you’d be the judge. He does hold “open house” for his trading room from time to time. Also, I believe that if you try his trading room for the first time, you try it for a month for about $50. As for me, he’s just another front runner using his trading room to profit with a bad sense of humor and exaggeration that make you cringe.
So you wanna trade Forex? - tips and tricks inside
Let me just sum some stuff up for you newbies out there. Ive been trading for years, last couple of years more seriously and i turned my strategies into algorithms and i am currently up to 18 algorithms thats trading for me 24/7. Ive learned alot, listened to hundreds of podcasts and read tons of books + research papers and heres some tips and tricks for any newbie out there.
Strategy - How to... When people say "you need a trading strategy!!" Its because trading is very hard and emotional. You need to stick to your rules at all times. Dont panic and move your stop loss or target unless your rules tell you to. Now how do you make these rules? Well this is the part that takes alot of time. If your rules are very simple (for example: "Buy if Last candles low was the lowest low of the past 10 candles." Lets make this a rule. You can backtest it manually by looking at a chart and going back in time and check every candle. or you can code it using super simple software like prorealtime, MT4 ++ Alot of software is basicly "click and drag" and press a button and it gives you backtest from 10-20-30 years ago in 5 seconds. This is the absolute easiest way to backtest rules and systems. If your trading "pure price action" with your drawn lines and shit, the only way to truly backtest that kind of trading is going in a random forex pair to a random point in time, could be 1 year ago, 1 month ago, 5 years ago.. and then you just trade! Move chart 1 candle at a time, draw your lines and do some "actual trading" and look at your results after moving forward in the chart. If you do not test your strategy your just going in blind, which could be disaster.. Maybe someone told u "this is the correct way to trade" or "this strategy is 90% sure to win every trade!!!" If you think you can do trading without a strategy, then your most likely going to look back at an empty account and wonder why you moved that stop loss or why you didnt take profit etc.. and then your gonna give up. People on youtube, forums, interwebz are not going to give you/sell you a working strategy thats gonna make you rich. If they had a working strategy, they would not give it away/sell it to you.
Money management - How to.... Gonna keep this one short. Risk a small % of your capital on each trade. Dont risk 10%, dont risk 20%. You are going to see loosing trades, your probably gonna see 5-10 loss in a row!! If your trading a 1000$ account and your risking 100$ on each trade (10%) and you loose 5 in a row, your down -50% and probably you cant even trade cus of margin req. Game over.. Now how does one get super rich, super fast, from risking 1-3% of your account on each trade?? Well heres the shocking message: YOU CANT GET RICH FAST FROM TRADING UNLESS YOUR WILLING TO GO ALL IN! You can of course go all in on each trade and if you get em all right, you might get 1000%, then you go all in 1 more time and loose it all... The whole point of trading is NOT going bust. Not loosing everything, cus if you loose it all its game over and no more trading for you.
Find your own trading style.... Everyone is different. You can have an average holding period of 1 month or you could be looking at a 1 min chart and average holding time = 10 minutes. For some, less volatility helps them sleep at night. For others, more volatility gives them a rush and some people crave this. There is no "correct" timeframes, or holding periods, or how much to profit or how much to loose. We are all individuals with different taste in risk. Some dont like risk, others wanna go all in to get rich over night. The smart approach is somewhere in the middle. If you dont risk anything, your not gonna get anything. If you risk everything, your most likely going to loose everything. When people are talking about trading style, this is kinda what that means.
There are mainly 2 ways to trade: Divergence and Convergence. Or in other words: Mean reversion or trend following. Lets talk about them both: Trend following is trying to find a trend and stay with the trend until its over. Mean reversion is the belief that price is too far away from the average XX of price, and sooner or later, price will have to return to its average/mean (hence the name: MEAN reversion). Trend following systems usually see a lower winrate (30-40% winrate with no money management is not uncommon to see when backtesting trend following systems.. You can add good money management to get the winrate % higher. Why is the % winrate so low? Well a market, whatever that market is, tend to get real choppy and nasty right after a huge trend. So your gonna see alot of choppy fake signals that might kill 5-6 trades in a row, until the next huge trend starts which is going to cover all the losses from the small losses before the trend took off. Then you gotta hold that trade until trade is done. How do you define "when trend starts and stops"? Well thats back to point 1, find a strategy. Try defining rules for an entry and exit and see how it goes when you backtest it. For mean reversion the win % is usually high, like 70-90% winrate, but the average winning trade is alot smaller than the average loosing trade. this happens because you are basicly trying to catch a falling knife, or catch a booming rocket. Usually when trading mean reversion, waiting for price to actually reverse can very often leave you with being "too late", so you kinda have to find "the bottom" or "the top" before it actually has bottomed/ topped out and reversed. How can you do this you ask? Well your never going to hit every top or every bottom, but you can find ways to find "the bottom-ish" or "the top-ish", thens ell as soon as price reverts back to the mean. Sometimes your gonna wish you held on to the trade for longer, but again, back to point 1: Backtest your rules and figure that shit out.
Read these 4 points and try to follow them and you are at least 4 steps closer to being a profitable trader. Some might disagree with me on some points but i think for the majority, people are going to agree that these 4 points are pretty much universal. Most traders have done or are doing these things every day, in every trade. Here is some GREAT material to read: Kevin Davey has won trading championship multiple times and he has written multiple great books, from beginner to advanced level. Recommend these books 100%, for example: Building winning algorithmic trading systems" will give you alot to work with when it comes to all 4 of the above points. Market wizards, Reminiscences of a stock operator are 2 books that are a great read but wont give you much "trading knowledge" that you can directly use for your trading. Books on "The turtles" are great reading. Then you have podcasts and youtube. I would stay away from youtube as much as possible when it comes to "Heres how to use the rsi!!!" or "this strategy will make you rich!!". Most youtube videoes are made by people who wanna sell you a course or a book. Most of this is just pure bullshit. Youtube can very harmfull and i would honestly advice about going there for "strategy adivce" and such. Podcasts tho are amazing, i highly recommend: Better systems trader, Chat with traders, Top traders unplugged, We study billionairs, to name a few :) Also, on a less funny note.. Please realize that you are, and i am, real fucking stupid and lazy compared to the actual pro's out there. This is why you should not go "all in" on some blind stupid strategy youve heard about. This is why this is indeed VERY FUCKING HARD and most, if not everyone has busted an account or two before realizing just this. Your dumb.. your not going to be super rich within 1 year.. You can not start with 500$ account and make millions! (some might have been able to do this, but know that for every winner, theres 999 loosers behind him that failed... Might work fine first 5 trades, then 1 fuckup tho and ur gone.. And lastly: Try using a backtesting software. Its often FREE!!! (on a demo account) and often so simple a baby could use it. If your trading lines and such there exists web broweser "games" and softwares that lets you go "1 and 1 candle ahead" in random forex pairs and that lets you trade as if its "real" as it goes. A big backtesting trap however is backtesting "losely" by just drawing lines and looking at chart going "oh i would have taken this trade FOR SURE!! I would have made so much money!!" however this is not actually backtesting, its cherry picking and its biased beyond the grave, and its going to hurt you. Try going 1 candle at a time doing "real and live" trades and see how it goes. Bonus point!! many people misunderstands what indicators like the RSI is telling you. Indeed something is "overbought" or "oversold" but only compared to the last average of xx amounts of bars/candles. It doesn't tell you that RIGHT NOW is a great time to sell or buy. It only tells you that the math formula that is RSI, gives you a number between 1-100, and when its above 70 its telling you that momentum is up compared to the last average 14 candles. This is not a complete buy/sell signal. Its more like a filter if anything. This is true for MOST indicators. They INDICATE stuff. Dont use them as pure buy/sell signals.. At least backtest that shit first! Your probably gonna be shocked at the shitty results if you "buy wehn rsi is undeer 30 and sell when RSI is above 70". Editedit: Huge post already, why not copy paste my comment with an example showing the difference in trend following vs mean reversion: The thing about trend following is that we never know when a trade starts and when it ends. So what often happens is that you have to buy every breakout going up, but not every breakout is a new trend. Lets do an example. Check out the photo i included here: https://imageshost.eu/image/image.RcC THE PHOTO IS JUST AN EXAMPLE THAT SHOWS WHY A TYPICAL TREND FOLLOWING STRATEGY HAVE A "LOW" WINRATE. THE PHOTO IS NOT SHOWING AN EXAMPLE OF MY STRATEGIES OR TRADING.
We identify the big orange trend up.
We see the big break down (marked with the vertical red line) this is telling us we are not going higher just yet. Our upwards trend is broken. However we might continue going up in a new trend, but when will that trend come?
We can draw the blue trend very earyly using highs and lows, lines up and down. Then we begin to look for breakouts of the upper blue line. So every time price breaks upper blue line we have to buy (cus how else are we going to "catch the next trend going up?)
As you can see we get 5 false breakouts before the real breakout happens! Now if you could tell fake breakouts from real breakouts, your gonna be rich hehe. For everyone else: Take every signal you can get, put a "tight" stop loss so in case its a fake signal you only loose a little bit. Then when breakout happens as you can clearly see in chart, your going to make back all the small losses. So in this example we fail 5 times, but get 1 HUGE new trend going further up. This 1 huge trade, unless we fuck it up and take profits too early or shit like that, is going to win back all those small losses + more. This is why trend following has a low winrate. You get 5 small loss and 1 big win. Now lets flip this! Imagine if your trading Mean reversion on all the same red arrows! So every time price hits the blue line, we go short back to the bottom (or middle) again! You would have won 5 trades with small profits, but on that last one you would get stopped out so hard. Meaning 5 small wins, 1 big loss (as some have pointed out in comments, if you where trading mean reverting you would wanna buy the lows as well as short the tops - photo was suppose to show why trend following strategies have a lower % winrate.) Final edit: sorry this looks like a wall of text on ur phones.
[educational] Stretgies for day trading based on Technical Analysis
1. Breakout
Breakout strategies center around when the price clears a specified level on your chart, with increased volume. The breakout trader enters into a long position after the asset or security breaks above resistance. Alternatively, you enter a short position once the stock breaks below support. After an asset or security trades beyond the specified price barrier, volatility usually increases and prices will often trend in the direction of the breakout. You need to find the right instrument to trade. When doing this bear in mind the asset’s support and resistance levels. The more frequently the price has hit these points, the more validated and important they become.
Entry Points
This part is nice and straightforward. Prices set to close and above resistance levels require a bearish position. Prices set to close and below a support level need a bullish position.
Plan your exits
Use the asset’s recent performance to establish a reasonable price target. Using chart patterns will make this process even more accurate. You can calculate the average recent price swings to create a target. If the average price swing has been 3 points over the last several price swings, this would be a sensible target. Once you’ve reached that goal you can exit the trade and enjoy the profit. https://preview.redd.it/0oj4a1xlvdh31.png?width=773&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f2aa07b0c7caeeb00c4f997c12e814abbd380da
2. Scalping
One of the most popular strategies is scalping. It’s particularly popular in the forex market, and it looks to capitalise on minute price changes. The driving force is quantity. You will look to sell as soon as the trade becomes profitable. This is a fast-paced and exciting way to trade, but it can be risky. You need a high trading probability to even out the low risk vs reward ratio. Be on the lookout for volatile instruments, attractive liquidity and be hot on timing. You can’t wait for the market, you need to close losing trades as soon as possible. https://preview.redd.it/dzaf7t1nvdh31.png?width=653&format=png&auto=webp&s=f3d96d74311de806c3809698df2a964e3eb4db5e
3. Momentum
Popular amongst trading strategies for beginners, this strategy revolves around acting on news sources and identifying substantial trending moves with the support of high volume. There is always at least one stock that moves around 20-30% each day, so there’s ample opportunity. You simply hold onto your position until you see signs of reversal and then get out. Alternatively, you can fade the price drop. This way round your price target is as soon as volume starts to diminish. This strategy is simple and effective if used correctly. However, you must ensure you’re aware of upcoming news and earnings announcements. Just a few seconds on each trade will make all the difference to your end of day profits. https://preview.redd.it/z4r2o6covdh31.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=b054c77c4bc5978821e879eff73d613d728cb0cf
4. Reversal
Although hotly debated and potentially dangerous when used by beginners, reverse trading is used all over the world. It’s also known as trend trading, pull back trending and a mean reversion strategy. This strategy defies basic logic as you aim to trade against the trend. You need to be able to accurately identify possible pullbacks, plus predict their strength. To do this effectively you need in-depth market knowledge and experience. The ‘daily pivot’ strategy is considered a unique case of reverse trading, as it centers on buying and selling the daily low and high pullbacks/reverse. https://preview.redd.it/4ya3txcpvdh31.png?width=776&format=png&auto=webp&s=f40216413b1376b2d6d5a67e4d09057f55be6ba1
5. Using Pivot Points
A day trading pivot point strategy can be fantastic for identifying and acting on critical support and/or resistance levels. It is particularly useful in the forex market. In addition, it can be used by range-bound traders to identify points of entry, while trend and breakout traders can use pivot points to locate key levels that need to break for a move to count as a breakout.
Calculating Pivot Points
A pivot point is defined as a point of rotation. You use the prices of the previous day’s high and low, plus the closing price of a security to calculate the pivot point. Note that if you calculate a pivot point using price information from a relatively short time frame, accuracy is often reduced. So, how do you calculate a pivot point?
Central Pivot Point (P) = (High + Low + Close) / 3
You can then calculate support and resistance levels using the pivot point. To do that you will need to use the following formulas:
First Resistance (R1) = (2*P) – Low
First Support (S1) = (2*P) – High
The second level of support and resistance is then calculated as follows:
Second Resistance (R2) = P + (R1-S1)
Second Support (S2) = P – (R1- S1)
Application
When applied to the FX market, for example, you will find the trading range for the session often takes place between the pivot point and the first support and resistance levels. This is because a high number of traders play this range. It’s also worth noting, this is one of the systems & methods that can be applied to indexes too. For example, it can help form an effective S&P day trading strategy
6. Moving Average Crossover
You will need three moving average lines:
One set at 20 periods – This is your fast moving average
One set at 60 periods – This is your slow moving average
One set at 100 periods – This is your trend indicator
This is one of the moving averages strategies that generates a buy signal when the fast moving average crosses up and over the slow moving average. A sell signal is generated simply when the fast moving average crosses below the slow moving average. So, You’ll open a position when the moving average line crosses in one direction and you’ll close the position when it crosses back the opposite way. How can you establish there’s definitely a trend? You know the trend is on if the price bar stays above or below the 100-period line. the source : https://www.daytrading.com/strategies
[R] Understanding The Price Movement Of Cryptocurrency Using Candlestick Charts
Having a basic knowledge of candlestick charts is a great starting point for anyone who is really interested in making a profit, rather than just playing games or speculating with their hard earned money in the cryptospace. The same candlestick that many financial institutions use to build their positions on the forex market is that the same candlestick traders also have in cryptocurrency exchanges. In the 18th century, candlestick charts were been invented and developed. The earliest reference to a candlestick chart being used in financial markets was found in Sakata, Japan, where a rice merchant named Munehisa and traders use the candlestick to trade ojima rice. So, particularly for newbies that don't know about these candlesticks, it's not a new thing. The candle may be red or green, white or black, some few exchanges may allow it to be defined at which they want to call them. Such candles reflect an activity that is bullish or bearish. Candle sticks can help anyone identify the next price action movement of a crypto asset, hence there are different candle stick patterns that will be encountered in exchanges that will determine their decisions. These candles are formed due to pressure or force of movement of price which result to form a full candle with or without sticks/wicks. The sticks are formed in the candle because of continuous force pushing or pulling the price of the crypto asset. (here is an illustrative representation of these candles for easy understanding) Why Is It A Must To Use Candlestick Patterns?
Crypto asset price movements are easier to understand to know where the trend actually moves into either bear or bullish area.
Recognizing the candle pattern and how they occur in that crypto asset's price history is easier.
Candlestick charts unveil a dynamic information in every areas of the price movement with respect to time. (Open, close, high and low) compare to other patterns such as the graph or line charts.
Is this Candlestick Patterns Used By Many? Due to the volatility of crypto instrument, most traders do not tend to read the chart before trading for the following reasons.
Greed
FeaDoubt
Lack of discipline
Lack of patience
Bottom Line Understanding candlestick patterns is a key factor to managing those portfolios in the crypto space for maximum returns of investment. Candlesticks helps traders to detect trend reversals and price action breakouts in the market which helps to build a strong and effective trading strategy.
Hey everyone! I️’m curious if anyone would be so kind as to share some names of generic market or liquidity inefficiencies that can be exploited for trade strategies. Ideally for futures and equities, but definitely interested in forex. Only looking to research these inefficiencies, how to exploit them is something I respect as secret so no worries if you keep that part to yourself! For instance, implied volatility plays a part in an imbalance that can be exploited, as the price goes down and implied volatility doesn’t increase, you’ve got an imbalance that can be used to predict likely future motion. Likewise, implied volatility drops but prices fall, another imbalance. Basically rely on mean reversion arbitrage using inputs of different market features that are notably out of balance from expected motion. No details beyond the identified imbalances is needed, and of course l understand this begins to flirt with secrets, but really just looking for some inefficiencies that I️ can try to develop my own strategies around. Thanks for all your advice!
free forex Trading signals and High Tight Flag Trading Tips
free forex Trading signals and Trading Tips Prices should climb at least 90% in two months or less. After the rise, find a place where prices pause—a congestion or consolidation area. the rules for buying after High, Tight Flag Wait for price to close above the upper trendline or above the pattern high if the pattern has no top trendline Buy the stock. Place a stop below the prior valley, below the pattern itself, or use a volatility stop. With this pattern, the most important rule is to wait for an upward breakout. In a test of 78 High, Tight Flag , I found 13 patterns that broke out downward. That might not sound like much until a failure happens to you. Save your bucks and wait for the upward breakout. The hardest thing to do when trading High, Tight Flag is to buy the stock. Chances are the forex is near the yearly high after doubling in price. How much higher can it possibly go? Buy in and find out! Remember, High, Tight Flag have the lowest failure rate and highest average gain of any chart pattern. Your selection may prove the exception and fail, so place a stop loss order below the valley nearest the breakout. This may be below the High, Tight Flag itself. Check to make sure the stop is not too close. You don’t want volatility to stop you out. Later in the book, I review two High, Tight Flag trades, one where I stole two grand from someone and another in which they stole it back . . . with interest. When identifying or forex trading signals High, Tight Flag , what should you look for or avoid? Here is a list: Avoid overhead resistance that may cause a throwback. High, Tight Flag with throwbacks rise just 49%, but the rise averages 100% for patterns without throwbacks. www.freeforex-signals.com free forex signals presents forex trading signals via SMS , Email and WhatsApp for Free
Hello, new traders. Here are a few words from my four and a half years of experience.
Hey! I’m a full time currency and cryptocurrency trader, I need to point out a few major fallacies and misconceptions I frequently see in this community and others. First up. If it’s your first year trading expect to fail. Actually, if there was a contract I could buy that’d pay me out if you ended up liquidating your account in the next 12 months, I’d literally bet on your failure. You need to immediately reduce your trading account to 1/10th of its original size for your first year of trading. Seriously, do it. You are betting that you can outperform billions of dollars of institutional order flow, typically with basic patterns or default setting indicators with no experience. Which brings me to my next point. Your strategy is not your identity, stop treating what you use to trade as dogma. That indicator or pattern you’re using, can you tell me why it works? Not HOW to use it, but what fundamental paradigm it uses to accurately predict future price action. There are legitimate answers, but trying to use your indicators/patterns without understanding why is like driving across the country without knowing how to open or what’s inside the hood or your car. Sure, you’re going to get pretty far, but eventually it’ll break down and you won’t have a clue what to do, stranded and starving in the middle of the desert. Chances are, while you were reading this you came up with one of three answers in your head as to why your indicatopattern works. Let me guess. “Everyone else uses it, it’s made me money so far, it’s natures law (for you Fibonacci folks,) or it’s a proven standard.” All of those are appeal to authority fallacies. For instance.... How does a compass work? Are the answers “well everybody else uses compasses” or “compasses are a proven standard” WHY a compass works? If you don’t know how a compass works and you’re lost, you aren’t going to know what variables will stop the compass from working. You might be in the Southern Hemisphere, that’d lead you in the exact opposite direction, but you wouldn’t know it because you DON’T KNOW WHY it works. Then die of starvation shortly after because you didn’t understand a tool paramount to your survival and couldn’t find your way back to civilization. If you’re lost in the ocean of institutional investors, AT LEAST understand why your tools work. For instance, why does divergence work? You probably know that divergence represents a reversal. Divergence doesn’t form because of “price” or “its losing momentum,” divergence forms because an oscillator defines a data set that expands and contracts based on the activity in the period lookback you define for it. When you have an expanding data set, it requires increasingly drastic moves to register the same “extreme” values. If you have a tight data set and you have a huge outlier, the data set widens to compensate with every candle close. So now that you have a wider data set, an equal move would register as a less extreme event as defined by the oscillator. That’s why divergence forms/works. Seriously, it’s worth learning these things. Unless you can explain why something works like I just did with divergence you shouldn’t EVER use it in your arsenal. Then if you do take the time to learn the “why,” you’ll start realizing that a lot of the commonly accepted tools are fundamentally broken. For instance, with your new understanding of divergence, think about overbought or oversold signals. Why would a new outlier of a data set imply a return to the center of the data set if the data set is in an active state of expansion, CAUSED by the outlier? Now if you’re relying on an appeal to authority fallacy for understanding, could it be that the authority that presented the information doesn’t have your best interest at heart? Breakout patterns for example. If you have a bull flag, and you’re betting on bullish trend continuation, I’ll take a wild guess about where you put your stop loss. Oh, below the bull flag? Large players know this and will scoop up your stops before pushing price up. How often have you said, “wow, I was right but I stopped out just before trend continuation!” The “golden standard” of technical analysis is only so to make the masses of retail traders a predictable herd of cattle. Also, stay away from entirely subjective strategies that will always appear correct in hindsight. Oh, how many times have you redrawn that Elliot wave extension to match what happened instead of what you predicted? Don’t you dare bring up the Fibonacci to justify your subjective drawings either. Fibonacci doesn’t work because “it’s natures law” or the “golden rule,” it just happens to be very similar to the first standard deviation of any price move. So why are you using a static reading to predict a dynamic value that changes with every candle close? For TA that actually works (if you use it correctly,) I can recommend ichimoku, though only on macro timeframes and requires a lot of reading to use properly. Mark Whistler’s books on volatility are my biggest recommendation to learn. Any strategy using WAVE PM and 3D WAVE PM are ideal, treating price strictly as reactionary, multiperiod probability distributions gives an excellent “why” in the chaos of the markets. The compression and expansion cycles can be defined to the exact period on any timeframe with the right readings. I created a write up a while back going in depth on my findings on probability distributions here. https://www.reddit.com/Forex/comments/ah5bxo/lets_talk_about_the_basics_of_advanced_volatility/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app I also created a google doc over the years and filled it with a few resources I’ve used to learn, I can hand it out if you dm me. Finally, don’t forget to do your FA. Macro level economic indications are incredibly important for defining the long term alignment of expectations. However never trade the news, this is an important distinction. Don’t bet that the US dollar will go down because Trump made a stupid tweet, please. What you SHOULD do is measure the strength of the move and the EXPANSION caused by the FA and identify where the compression begins afterwards. For every period of expansion, there is a predictable compressionary range that follows that is equal to the expansion. For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Instead of betting on the news, bet on the reaction after the news has cooled off. That’s all that immediately comes to mind. Feel free to ask any questions.
Looking back in recent history, it seems as though big investors and financial organizations are changing their attitudes towards Bitcoin and altcoins. The media coverage worldwide illuminated the vast returns being had in the cryptocurrency markets, with many coins up over 100x since their conception. This certainly has garnered the attention from both legacy and newcomer investors. Currently, everyone is waiting to see if cryptocurrencies can continue on their path to new all time highs. 2017 turned out to be a whirlwind year, with most cryptocurrencies soaring to new all time highs at the end of 2017 and early 2018. The media coverage of cryptocurrencies was nonstop, with news reports on financial programs almost daily. In addition, many movies and tv shows mentioned cryptocurrency, including the technology oriented show “Silicon Valley.” So far, 2018 has seen a vast pullback in the cryptocurrency markets. Many of the smaller altcoins are down over 90% with Bitcoin, the crypto leader, still being down over 60% from all time highs. Even with the overall market pullback, many investors are still very bullish on cryptocurrencies going into 2019. Many big name institutions are jumping head first into crypto, with NYSE announcing a new crypto exchange, BAAKT. Also Fidelity has announced a crypto support platform for their customers. Even legendary Ivy league university Yale has announced a new 400 million dollar investment fund geared towards cryptocurrency. With so much bullish news adding up rapidly, almost everyone seems to expect a very profitable year for crypto leading into 2019. While Bitcoin is still currently the market leader there are also some big name altcoins that expect 2019 to be a huge year for them. The Altcoin Hierarchy Before investing in the crypto market, let us go through the basic classes of cryptocurrencies that exist in the market. While every class has the potential to have impressive returns, some coins have more impressive use cases and concepts, In addition to more qualified and funded development teams. Simply put, not all altcoins were created the same. The Penny Stocks of Crypto These are the bottom tier altcoins that could possibly become worthless in the near future. They operate much like penny stocks, advertising big promises of ‘guaranteed gains’. Eventually, many fail to offer a fraction of their promised returns. One of the ways to identify these is to look at their team members, their past experiences, objectives of the project, probability of mass adoption, actual use of the coins and many more. The reasons for their failure is usually because of unwillingness to work for the vision they once promised in the first place, bad wealth management, inclusion of scammers in their team, unrealistic expectation from the project and also making money via pump and dump schemes. Some of these coins are Trumpcoin, Russia Coin and Verge. Average Coins According to the ‘coinmarketcap’ website, there are currently more than 2000 cryptocurrencies listed on their website. Among those, there are around 500 of them that can be considered in this ‘average’ category. These are the coins that do have a purpose/objective to work on but fail to maintain a good development team. They and their coins don’t really have any kind of purpose in the crypto market and fail to finalize any kind of legitimate deals and partnerships with good investors. This makes their performance very limited as compared to other altcoins in the market. Some of these coins are Deep Brain Chain, Funfair, Decred, Navcoin, Populous, Cryptonex. Good Coins There are around 500 of such good coins in the market that do offer a good objective for the project, a solid team with good experience to execute such tasks, a good marketing strategy to reach out to masses to share their ideas and quality contacts to make some good partnerships in the market. The only reason why they are only classified as ‘good coins’ is due to the lack of uniqueness that the other ‘very good coins’ offer. They don’t really have that ‘point of parity’ in their project/product that separates them from their counterparts. Some of these coins are NEM, Stratis, Monero, and BAT. Very Good Coins There are around 100 such ‘very good coins’ in the market. Their objectives are well defined with a solid team to execute their tasks perfectly. Along with that, their marketing teams are also well-qualified to make their ideas reach to the masses. Because of such a wonderful blend, they are able to make better and strong partnerships with a number of good companies. What separates them from the ‘Good Coins’ category is their USPs (Unique Selling Points). They are unique in what they do and that’s what makes the difference. Such coins are NEO, Stellar, Cardano, Ripple Top Tier Cryptocurrencies These are the top tier coins that provide the best functionalities. They have real-world usage, objectives to solve a real-world problem, strong fundamental teams to execute the mission of the project, marketing teams to spread the ‘idea’ and collaboration with a number of media channels to gain early investors. Also, due to a good PR team, they are able to make a very strong partnership with a lot of Fortune 500 companies that give them an extra edge over rest of the projects in the market. Some of these coins are VeChain, Ethereum, Bitcoin, IOTA, Icon, EOS, Kinesis. Promising Projects Going Into the New Year With more than 2000 cryptocurrencies out there in the crypto market, only a couple 100 of them qualify to be a top tier investment. It can be quite the challenge to find a worthy project among the thousands of choices. These next projects are some that show a lot of promise heading into 2019. Always remember the 3’S’ of the investment – Sane, Smart and Sensible. An investor who is sane, smart and sensible will always look into the facts before he invests in any business or project. Kinesis This is one of the most promising upcoming projects in crypto. The broad overview of the coin is to offer an alternate and better evolutionary step beyond the basic monetary and banking system available today. In short, it is a cryptocurrency that is backed by precious metals like gold and silver. According to the CEO of the company, Thomas Coughlin, the Kinesis coin is basically divisible units of allocated gold and silver which you can use as a currency. There will be two stable Kinesis coins in the market backed by Gold and Silver. The stable Kinesis coins backed by Gold will be tagged as KAU and the stable Kinesis coins backed by Silver will be tagged as KAG. These stablecoins backed by the precious metals like Gold and Silver are real game changers as these 2 precious metals are definable stores of value for use in trade and investment in the real-world economies. The Kinesis coin is based on the Bespoke Blockchain Technology, a blockchain network forked off from the Stellar Blockchain Technology in order to suit the requirements of the Kinesis coin. The cryptocurrency project is headed by Thomas Coughlin who is also the CEO of the Kinesis company. He has 15 years experience in the investment, funds management and capital markets. Before being the CEO of the Kinesis company, he held similar positions for the Bullion Capital and TRAC Financial Group as well. Apart from Thomas Coughlin, there are other great members in the team as well. Their team consists of people like: Michael Coughlin, Chief Financial Officer, having 41 years experience as a CPA in the accountancy and financial services professions. Eric Maine, Chief Strategy Officer, having more than 30 years experience in Senior Management in the exchange and financial markets. Ryan Case, Head of Sales & Trading in Kinesis, having extensive experience as Head of sales trading & partnership and also valuable experience in commodity, cryptocurrency, forex and derivative markets. Jai Bifulco, Chief Marketing Officer, having a full-fledged 12 years of experience in award-winning full-stack marketer in Finance. He previously held roles of directors in multiple brokerages, consulting and Fintech sectors. There are more than 30 different team members in this project spanning their roles from The Executive Committee to the Advisory Board to the Operations and Development team. The coins are very limited in number as compared to other cryptocurrencies where the softcap is limited to just 15,000 KVT coins and HardCap is limited to 300,000 KVT coins. Minimum token that one can buy is set to 1 KVT which is equal to $1000. So far, more than 57,000 KVT tokens have been sold which roughly equals to a whopping sum of $57 Million. With such a huge investment already deployed for the development of the project, there are still 30 more days left for the ICO sale period to end. Also, apart from the investments gained, the Kinesis cryptocurrency is also focusing much on the partnerships with the top companies in the industry. These include companies like ABX (Allocated Bullion Exchange), MLG (Blockchain Consulting), Sigma Prime, Etherlabs and Fine Metal Asia Limited. This cryptocurrency is certainly the one to watch out for in 2019. VeChain Broad Overview – In simple layman terminology, Vechain is a supply chain protocol to track logistics inventory. It has successfully implemented blockchain technology in various sectors like agriculture and industries like luxury goods and liquor. They basically strive to solve real-life problems by providing solutions in various industries like: Logistics: In this sector, VeChain implements the blockchain technology to improve the flow of information from one department to another by breaking silos yet maintaining the data privacy of every department. Government: There are more than 111 VeChain nodes deployed worldwide. The municipal governments participate in the VeChain blockchain network as nodes. The VeChain blockchain network offers decentralization and immunity against the data hacking that allows room for transparent information exchange. This indeed improves the efficiency of the municipal governments. The technologies used to track the logistics are: Assigning digital identities to physical stocks that can be stored on the VeChain blockchain network Usage of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) NFC (Near Field Communication) Proof Of Authority Consensus In-House Temperature Controlled Tracking Quick Response Codes (QR Codes) The future potential of the VeChain cryptocurrency looks quite promising as the coin is signing new partnerships every month or so. Some of its partners are PricewaterhouseCoopers, DNV GL, Renault Group, KUEHNE + NAGEL, D.I.G, China Unicom and the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration of China. Every single company with whom VeChain partnered has millions of customers that will use the VeChain technology embedded in their system. This makes the coin solve real-life problems and have mass adoption. VeChain indeed makes a big difference in the logistics business. However, given the kind of turmoil that the entire cryptomarket is facing where the total market capitalization has fallen from $800 Billion to just around $200 Billion, no one can give any kind of assurance on the returns in your investment in the crypto assets. However, stablecoins like Kinesis has a reward yield system that incentivizes its investors for holding, depositing and also referring new users. Hence, the investors always stay on the benefit side even if the market collapses for a short duration. IOTA In simple terms, IOTA is a cryptocurrency which is designed for the Internet of Things. The cryptocurrency was developed to root a new direction to IoT by establishing a standardization called, ‘Ledger of Everything’ which means that the data exchange between sensor-equipped machines would be enabled to populate IoT. IOTA has the potential to make transactions easy. A basic use case of IOTA can be seen in IOTA enabled vending machines. These machines can dispense the items without involving the associated transaction costs. Some other use cases of IOTA are Reddit Chains etc. Technology Behind IOTA Surprisingly, IOTA does not use the traditional Blockchain technology for its design and development. In fact, a new platform called ‘Tangle Technology’ is being used for IOTA to operate on. The Tangle Technology deploys a mathematical concept called Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) which resolves both the scalability and transaction fees issues which we face in blockchain based cryptocurrencies. In IOTA, for a transaction to be valid, each node present in DAG Tangle must approve the previous two transactions occurring at the other node. And adding to a note, this process removes the chances of mining and makes the system fully decentralized. Future Potential Keeping in mind the remarkable result of IOTA, there exists a promising scope for it in the near future in various applications and platforms. IOTA would be standing tall and different in the future world full of cryptocurrencies vulnerable to quantum computers. IOTA has a lot of companies that it is working with. Some of them include Bosch, Volkswagen,Fujitsu, Accenture, Poyry and many more. When viewed from a macro perspective, so far IOTA looks to be fee-less, scalable and fast which makes it next to perfect. However, if you own IOTA, the chances of you liquidating it into fiat currency via a ‘debit card’ and buying something from a grocery store is quite low. In order to fill this gap of actually buying something from the street market and becoming the global currency, Kinesis has introduced its Kinesis Debit Cards that enables the Kinesis token holders to exchange their tokens against FIAT currency and simultaneously buy products from a grocery shop, something which IOTA fails to offer. ICON ICX Broad Overview: ICON is a South Korean based company that develops blockchain technology and accompanies the cryptocurrency called ‘ICX’. ICON is a network framework which has been designed to allow independent blockchains to interact with each other. It allows interconnected blockchain networks to participate in a decentralized system which converges at a central point. Technology: ICX token is built on the Ethereum blockchain network. ICON has developed a loop-chain platform that connects different blockchain communities through the ICON Republic which serves as the governing head for the Federation of other independent blockchain bodies. All the communities are linked to Republic through C-Reps (Community Representatives) which then connects to Nexus. C-Reps functions as the portals to the communities to establish a connection with Nexus. And this way the entire procedure is carried out. Future Scope: It is believed that ICON has plans to provide platforms to financial, security, insurance, healthcare, educational industries which can help them to carry transactions on a single network. Thus, ICON (ICX) can be seen having a good time in the coming days. Also, it has been successful in signing a partnership deal with the tech-giant Samsung where it will be using ICON’s own Chain ID for a new Samsung project called ‘Samsung Pass’. Apart from Samsung, ICON has also signed deals with PORTAL NETWORK & W Foundation. However, it is notable that ICON is built on the Ethereum network and is an ERC20 token. Hence, the transaction speed greatly depends on the Ethereum network. Currently, Ethereum can execute 15 transactions per second which is quite low in terms of what ICON (ICX) is currently aiming for. However, to fill this gap, we have Kinesis Bespoke Technology that offers a whopping speed of 3000 transactions per second. This lightning fast speed keeps the Kinesis token way ahead than ICX token. Enjin Broad Overview The native cryptocurrency of the Enjin Network, the Enjin Coin (popularly known as only ENJ) follows the ERC20 token standard and is used with a smart contract-based blockchain platform. Its typical users include content creators, game developers, and other members of the gaming community, who need to use virtual tokens to manage and trade virtual goods in the gaming world. Technology behind Enjin As an ERC20-compliant token, the ENJ functions in accordance with the rules an Ethereum contract has to implement. It is used on a dedicated platform that is designed to support open-source software development kits (SDKs), applications, plug-ins, and payment gateways. As for its users, they will be able to efficiently participate in developing, launching, managing, and trade content and game-related products on the Enjin Network, without having to deal with the technical complexities. Summary of Potential The ENJ is expected to solve some performance issues in using similar cryptocurrencies on the market today, including payment frauds where goods are not actually delivered, slow transaction processes, lack of ownership of virtual goods, lack of transaction standards, and centralization problems. According to its creators, the ENJ coin, which is based on a blockchain, will create a distributed, trustworthy, and secure framework where transactions can be executed smoothly and quickly with minimal transaction fees. Its autonomous and decentralized system will ensure that all offers and deals will be honored. Conclusion Generally speaking, the Enjin Coin is good. It helps bring the benefits of blockchain to millions of people participating in the virtual goods market. Its creators are working hard to prevent fraud in the gaming world. However, it is still a relatively new project. As such, it is still volatile. This means that you still have to take utmost care and be wise when using it. EOS Broad Overview EOS is considered by many people who are participating in the virtual goods market as one of the best cryptocurrencies to use, supported by a powerful infrastructure for decentralized applications. Basically, the EOS blockchain is used for the development, execution, and hosting of decentralized applications (dApps) that are traded virtually. Technology behind EOS The EOS system is composed of two key components, which are the EOS.IO and the EOS token. As for the former, it functions like a computer’s operating system in managing and controlling the EOS blockchain, with the use of an architecture that enables horizontal and vertical dApps. As for the latter, it is held (instead of spent) by the users to be able to become eligible of building, running, and trading apps, as well as using EOS network resources. While EOS still does not have an official full form, it supports all core functionalities to allow individuals and businesses to create and trade blockchain-based apps. It also runs on a web toolkit for interface development, just like Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store. Summary of Potential While there are already a lot of cryptocurrencies based on Ethereum similar to it, the EOS system focuses on the critical and problematic points of the blockchain. Specifically, it attempts to solve the problems of scalability, speed, and flexibility that often cause transaction processes to slow down, which is a common issue in blockchain-based systems. According to its creators, EOS.IO could also address other problems that come with the ever-increasing size of the dApps ecosystem, such as limited availability of resources, constrained networks, spamming, false transactions, and limited computing power. It is said to be able to support thousands of commercial-scale dApps without hitting performance bottlenecks by using asynchronous communication methodologies and parallel execution across its network. Conclusion The EOS system is very advanced. It is designed to address common problems with standard blockchain-based networks. But like other new cryptocurrency platforms on the virtual market today, it still has some weak points to improve. Also, there is again the exposure to volatility, as users hold the tokens to be eligible to trade virtually. Nebulas Broad overview Nebulas (NAS) is a new generation blockchain and is open for public collaborations for decentralized application (dApp) development. Its adaptability and scalability are the two characteristics that could propel NAS to be one of the top cryptocurrencies, thus giving it enough leverage to compete in the market. Technology behind Nebulas Nebulas is the first crypto running on a 3rd generation blockchain, thus making it the dominant player of the new platform. This makes Nebulas highly flexible and scalable, even giving a good leverage in future-proofing their code. That could help avoid hard forking whenever some issues come up during scaling processes. Summary of potential Adaptability, scalability and search-ability are three of the biggest potential NAS has to offer. With the 3rd generation blockchain it uses, it can allow the adaption of other codes based from Nebulas. This means that other cryptos can adapt to its platform soon enough. Moreover, it can also act as a blockchain search engine. This can let users search particular blockchains based on efficiency and community strength. Finally, its goal to provide fair incentives to Decentralized Application (dApp) developers is something that collaborators could expect. This means that more developers are expected to come, thus strengthening NAS even further. Conclusion Nebulas (NAS) is a promising crypto especially with its adaptability, scalability and search-ability potentials. It can help with the fluidity of crypto into this new generation platform. However, it still lacks the value stability that Kinesis or stablecoins hold. NAS is still unpredictable, unlike Kinesis that backs it value with real gold. Sky Broad overview SkyCoin is a full environment system of blockchain technology, and has the goal of endorsing the actual usage of cryptocurrency. Technology behind Sky Sky has its own algorithm, the Obelisk, which uses the web of trust dynamics to spread influence all throughout the network to come up with a consensus decision. The consensus decision depends on each node, by valuing its influence score. The influence score of each node is determined by the number of network nodes connected to it. This depicts the importance of the node to the network. Aside from the Obelisk, Sky also operates its own cryptocurrency which is SkyCoin, its own ICO platform Fiber, a decentralized social media platform called BBS, and a decentralized messenger called Sky-Messenger. Summary of potential Sky focuses its potential on being a full ecosystem of blockchain technology that encourages actual usage of crypto. Through its unique algorithm which is the Obelisk and some other dApps associated with it, Sky is a promising crypto technology and could be considered as the most complete one as of today. Conclusion Sky, SkyCoin and the Obelisk is definitely a massive platform that could be considered as a full ecosystem of crypto and its related technology. Nonetheless, the SkyCoin depends its value on node influence scores, which could change from time to time as well. This makes Kinesis and Stablecoins still a better choice, especially for investors who want clear investments without hassle. Crypto Predictions for 2019 While 2017 had the masses captivated and investing large amounts of capital, 2018 has seen price drops and sagging hopes. While the returns in 2017 exceeded anyone’s expectations, a strong pullback was predicted by many. Whether or not this bear market continues from here is the real question many investors face today. Bitcoin’s rapid rise and fall exposed many problems, and the developers of the top cryptocurrencies in 2019 took note. When considering your crypto investments for 2019, factor in the following trends we predict will influence investments: More Pullbacks According to the CEO of Vellum Capital, Eric Kovalak, the price of cryptos will reach new lows before they will rebound to new heights. This includes the biggest cryptocurrencies in the market, including Bitcoin. Kovalak believes that it will be priced below $3,500 before it will find its way back up. However, there are many mixed opinions on the current price of BTC, with some arguing the bottom for the crypto markets have already been seen. Due to Bitcoin-based remittances, uncertainty in global economies like Asia, Turkey and Venezuela, and mobile penetration, there will be a surge in interest and the price of the digital currency. A Flood of Institutional Investors Institutional investors have been waiting on the sideline for the ETF to rule in favor of Bitcoin. According to Mike Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy Capital, once the ETF arrives, “institutional fomo’ will start flooding the market.” Another factor is Kinesis, the investment blockchain that provides investors with a safe and reliable alternative. Pegged against precious metals, it provides protection against volatility that may be caused by political instability. The Kinesis Monetary System lets you own real gold or silver when you purchase the digital currency. Your ownership is then digitized and then made available for spending, trading, and transfer. What is even better, the monetary system can be used internationally, ensuring reliability of money around the world. With the recent crisis around the Turkish Lira, the price of gold has significantly increased. Mass adoption of crypto by consumers In January 2019, blockchain technology will be 10 years old. It remains a speculative investment to this day but 2019 could be the year of mass adoption for digital currencies. For this to happen, however, there has to be some triggers. Speculation should become a real utility. People must use blockchain projects in everyday life so they will gain widespread use. Decentralized applications (DApps) must gain mainstream status to promote widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies. Improved payment processing, addressing the issue on the current situation of slow transaction times and high transaction fees. Scalability of blockchain technology with little to no impact on its efficiency. To date, slow transaction times are due to the growing number of users and transaction sizes. This calls for blockchain to grow and have the ability to compete with Mastercard, PayPal, or Visa. Introduction of off-chain solutions that allow users to complete a transaction through peer-to-peer payment channel instead of within the blockchain. This will address slow transaction times. Security will be provided by the parent blockchain. Gold Is Still The Standard Despite the promises and unique functions of many cryptocurrencies, there is still uncertainty in these new markets. Gold has remained the best form of investment throughout history, and the best store of value, especially through times of crisis in politics and economies. Kinesis pegs its value to gold which has proven to be the safest investment in history. Therefore Kinesis stands to gain from the stability gold offers while simultaneously fusing it with the unique features of this cutting edge crypto technology. With the Kinesis Monetary System, investing in gold is no longer the slow process that many older investors are used to. This cryptocurrency is backed by gold and silver and supports precious metals trade. It has three essential assets. Tokens that represent an investors ownership of gold and silver. The inherited system where performance is done. Complete blockchain security that supports investments and paves the way for the creation of new assets protected in a banking system. Most importantly, the Kinesis Monetary System allows thousands of transactions to be completed per second in a completely secure channel. The Near Future Even a decade later, cryptocurrencies are still very much in their infancy. At this time, no one is sure what shape this growing sector will take in the future. Many cryptocurrencies will come and go but the ones that show the most promise, that fulfill their use cases, will stick around for the long term. With any emerging technology, we have to watch how it evolves and how it merges with our everyday life, changing the way we interact with everything around us.
Liquid markets such as forex tend to move in smaller increments because their high liquidity results in lower volatility. More traders trading at the same time usually results in the price making small movements up and down. However, drastic and sudden movements are also possible in the forex market. Since currencies are affected by so many political, economical, and social events, there are ... Tips for Trading Volatility . Share: Market volatility is a reality that, before long, every trader has to face. When the markets are moving, here are a few strategies to help you manage risk and come out on top. 1. Color between the Lines. To trade the trend, all you have to do is pretend that you are coloring between the lines. When the market gets near support, look for it to rise; if it ... Identifying the points where price potentially stops and reverses is very helpful to any trader. They are commonly used in combination with other signal-generating conditions. There are several volatility-based indicators all using volatility in a clever way to help identify trading opportunities. Volatility can arise at any time in the forex markets, so it’s important to know how to spot it and make informed trading decisions. Find out more... This article will provide you with everything you need to know about Volatility Indicators for Forex trading. You will learn about volatility in general, the Parabolic SAR, the Momentum Indicator, and more. Additionally, you will find out how to use these indicators with practical examples, that guide you through every step involved. Volatility in Trading. Trading Forex is not just about price ... High accuracy “MACD Volatility Quality Forex Trading Strategy” – The Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) ... Not only because it is relatively easy to use, but also because it is quite effective at identifying both market trends and market momentum. As most TA indicators, however, the MACD is not always accurate and may provide numerous false and misleading signals ... The volatility of a major currency pair. Hourly volatility is relevant to short term forex traders but is not a significant factor for long term investors. The global trading sessions affect volatility within the 24 hours. A forex pair is typically most volatile when a major trading session opens, or two market sessions overlap with one another ...
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Volatility can interrupt a trend but it can also present interesting trading opportunities. There are several ways to identify and forecast volatility within the fores and other capital markets ... In this video, you will get a simple way of trading forex especially volatility indices using MACD and stochastic indicators. There we trade based on diverge... Here is an accurate strategy for Forex trading and Volatility Indices trading!! JOIN OUR FREE SIGNALS TELEGRAM CHANNEL HERE : https://t.me/atg_boomandcrash F... My 12 hr pattern trading and understanding High Volatile Days Forex Another quick video on how I trade Forex using the 12 hr pattern and understand the Trend Reversal on High Volatility days of ... What is Volatility? -The magnitude of the change -It is independent of direction, it refers to the change of ups and downs Why is it Important? -The more vol... In this episode, we cover how to trade news and volatility in the Forex market. I am joined by Chris Weston, Investment Manager at Pepperstone. If you want to watch other videos in this series, ...